So I’m sitting here re-watching Mario Van Peebles’ Universal Soldier/Terminator/Robocop mash-up movie, aka Solo, and I’m having a good time… laughing a lot.
Not a good flick, but you can call it a guilty pleasure.
I haven’t seen it in awhile, and had completely forgotten about Adrien Brody’s pivotal role in it, as Solo’s designer. This was some 6 years before his Academy Award-winning performance in The Pianist. We all have to start somewhere right?
Solo was based on a 1989 science fiction novel by Robert Mason titled Weapon. But it got me thinking… despite how painfully derivative it is, I couldn’t immediately name another similar sci-fi flick that featured a cyborg/robot star character played by a black actor.
Looking at all the influences I mentioned above (the Universal Soldier/Terminator/Robocop franchises) and others, they’ve always been played by white men.
So is Solo one for the history books then, as one of very few, or maybe the only film in which a black actor stars as a cyborg/robot?
Help a brotha out… Can you think of one that wasn’t?
Then again, there is The Black Terminator:
Here’s a trailer for Solo:
