User Reviews

It's kind of funny that Canónigo Films, Cuca Canals and Christian Molina made a movie bashing and preaching against television violence when its movie is just as violence. Hypocrites. Christian Molina is not a role model at all, with his work in erotic thrillers. A series of movies that sex and violence! So he has no right to preach against television violence. I think personally, he made this movie only because he sees television as a threat to cinema filmmakers. The movie is produce by a Spanish director, but it's doesn't feel like a Spanish film. It doesn't even feel like an America film or British. I have no clue where this movie is supposed to be place at. I want to be a Soldier is a movie about Alex, an average ten year old kid who has a great imagination. While the film wants you to think of this as unhealthy obsession that marks him asocial to the point that children like him are unable to befriend his peers. The reasons because he has imaginary friends that indicate an emotional void that been missing. Big names in child development had long maintained that kids must invent their friends for dark reasons. Clearly it's not like that at all as Alex has a good relationship with his parents. In reality, many people have imagination friends and it's pretty healthy. Alex seems like a normal boy who creates one just for fun. A role model name Astronaut Captain Harry based on his interests in space travel is not troublesome. It wasn't until the birth of his twin baby brothers, Alex feels more neglected than usual. With his parents spending more time with his brothers, he seeks somebody to spent time with him. He sees it in everybody's favorite babysitter: television. He ask his father into buying him a TV for his room, and starts spending hours watching violent programming. As his antisocial behavior deepens, he also takes on a new imaginary friend, Sergeant John Cluster who will teach him how to realize his new dream of being a great soldier. It was here that he became more and more morbid fascination for images portraying violence. He begins to develop a problems with his parents and school when he start to act out the violence he sees. The producers got the idea for the film due to reading a newspaper headline that stated: By the time a child turns 18, if parents don't prevent it, their child will have seen more than 40.000 murders and 200.000 acts of violence on Internet, TV, newspapers etc. Canonigo collaborates with a group of teachers to help get this movie be made so to prevent that. I think the movie just makes it worse by over blowing that all television is bad. Television isn't all bad for children. Media is about 50 bad and 50 good. Nothing is intrinsically evil. TV, like all technology, is a double edged sword. It can distract you from other, more productive things, but also help you be aware of the world you live in. There are some programming that is very beneficial for children that teaches people to do or finish a task. If a child is watching smart quality programming, that child will be more like well-off than those that didn't. Just because a child is watching a violence movie doesn't mean he will turn out evil. Violence in societies such as ours is declining, as media violence increases. In the US, the rate of violent crime has been in sustained decline for 10 years. It's because most media that shows violence, shows the consequences of such actions which is death, prison, or personal pain. Most children are smart enough to know that and willing to follow those rules in place so they don't end there. Plus, most television have rating system in place as well as rules of what they can show and can't show. Watching violence in television is the same as seeing it in art paintings, books, and other media sources. If there is a source that needs to be look at, it's the internet. The internet has more freedom than television on what they can show. Like I said before, it's depends on what you view. Alex sees his parents are constantly fighting due to the twins which is causing the boy to hate them as he blames them for the downfall of his family life. There is a really good speech toward the end about that. The movie does bring up some good points, but still, the film basically one side says that if you are a soldier or want to be a soldier, you are a psychopath who likes killing and torturing anything you can like a Nazi. It has nothing to do with patriotism, protecting yourself and your family or helping others. The military has other roles then killing people, especially today. Soldiers can send to areas to help the people affect by natural disasters, drug abuse or crime. If your sole purpose in joining is to kill, you won't pass the screening process. The kid needs real discipline, not "No TV". That should be the primary point made in the film. The movie suffers from that. The fact that Danny Glover, Robert Englund, and anybody involve in the film that continues to film horror and action violent movies after this, is prove that they have no clue what they are talking about. They shouldn't be taken seriously.

There are some mild spoilers in this review. Here we are in a seemingly American family, besides the mothers British accent, with a young boy named Alex played by one of my favorite actors Fergus Riordan. It starts at the beginning of the film with 10-year-old Alex as happy as any child can be while also expecting two younger twin siblings.

The moment the twins are brought into the home kind of presents a problem for young Alex as he finds that he can no longer do what he did before having them there thus emitting a burst of rage from him when he can not watch T.V. I thought it was quite humorous when he dropped hints to his dad that he wanted to have his own T.V. in which the dad relented, talked to his mother about it, and ultimately buys him one.

It takes a twist when he switches on the television to be greeted with scenes of war, death, and pure sadness. He then sees the army who are handing out cases of water and other provisions. That is where the Army Captain imaginary friend is born and the Astronaut Harry pretty much dead. He gains an all-out fascination with the violence of war, cuts his hair like an army recruit and wears his dad's army uniform.

In general, I think that this film's message is pretty much this: When you bring in two new babies and show them more attention than what you showed the one before them and the father is having an affair with the mother, it's going to end pretty nasty for any child. The child begins to lose touch with everyone around him primarily focusing everything within, happiness, anger, sadness, frustration. All this pent up emotion tends to erupt and who did it erupt with? Poor little Max, whose brother (a teenage boy older than either of the kids in the film) gets upset, beats the crap out of Alex who whips out a knife and is ultimately stabbed by the teenager and left to die on the street....I know, pretty brutal right? A saddening film indeed.

The start of the film seems to set up the film as a good child gone bad due to TV/computer violence. The end of the film narrator implies that children copy adults. But the child has dillusions via an imaginary friend so he must have mental issues, right ? Doesn't this render the childs perceptions of the world invalid ? This makes the whole film invalid in its approach to the media/parenting producing violent offspring or children copying adults. The film itself is okay to watch if you you forget that a young delusional child that doesn't get its own way to watch TV, finally watches TV and then becomes violent because he listens to his imaginary friend after seeing TV programs showing violence.