Men Aren't Thinking About Ancient Rome. We're Too Busy Imagining Saving the Day

Toy Soldiers left a lasting impression on me

Tri-Star Pictures

One of the internet’s evergreen obsessions is deciphering what’s going on in men’s heads. You’ve probably seen the memes.

LMAO. This is an accurate representation of the kind of stuff men think about.

This stems from, I think, the fact that women are generally more expressive than men and therefore wonder what our problem is. Our silence is sometimes assigned ulterior motives. If you ask a man what he’s thinking about, there’s a 90% chance he’ll say, “nothing.” And that may be true! Sometimes our minds are a vacant space.

But often we’re thinking about something so left field, it can be accurately dismissed as nothing. It’s not truly nothing. It’s just not relevant to anything going on in our lives or the world. It’s empty calories. Randomly remembering a funny scene. Pondering fantasy football moves. Mapping out in careful detail how to handle winning a mega lottery.

The Roman Empire trend from 2023—gads, has it been 2 years?—posited that men think about Ancient Rome on the regular.¹ It’s a cute meme because it sheds further light into the dark recesses of the male mind. And it’s kinda true. I do think a lot of men are fascinated by the Romans. They ruled one of the largest empires the world has ever known and also had gladiators. But the meme ultimately rings false.

I’m a history nerd who plays D&D. Ancient Rome isn’t just in my wheelhouse—it should be the entire thing. But I barely think about Rome. I’m more likely to think about heroically saving my family and complete strangers from a surprise terrorist attack. I bet if you ask a dude in your life, he’ll say the same.

I blame movies.

I have zero combat training. I’ve fired a gun once. I am 100% more Austin Powers than James Bond.² Nonetheless, movies have convinced me I could rise to the occasion in moments of true danger. This is how deep the fantasy runs: when I go to a restaurant, I never sit with my back to the door.³ If I’m in a public location, I identify the exits in case a quick escape is necessary. Even on an airplane!

I didn’t realize how much this worldview stems from one movie, Toy Soldiers (1991)—not to be confused with Small Soldiers, a movie about toy soldiers—until I recently revisited it. Toy Soldiers is about a prep school for boys that gets taken over by terrorists. The students are all sons of important Americans, and the terrorists want to use the hostages to force the government to release the father of the main terrorist. It’s actually a pretty sound plot, as far as these things go.

Toy Soldiers is a teenage version of Die Hard. Sorta. The film begins with a woman being thrown out a window to her death, and minutes later a priest is yeeted from helicopter. These terrorists are not messing around. The film is rated R and stars a bunch of teenagers, which makes you wonder who the target audience is. The Die Hard comp holds up though because much of the film involves the teenagers sneaking around, including the ubiquitous ventilator shaft scene. The teenage-helmed story is a bit farfetched but not completely out of the realm of possibility.

Sean Astin stars as a troubled kid who has bounced from one school to the next. This is actually the most ridiculous part of the movie. Astin’s a one pitch hitter—he can knock it out of the park as earnest, slightly gullible dudes. (See: The Goonies, Rudy, The Lord of the Rings, Stranger Things.) Anything else is a whiff. I don’t care how many wife beaters you put him in—I’m not buying him as an outlaw.

He’s a lowercase ‘t’ troublemaker, but also a leader of (young) men and secretly a boss hacker. He’s got potential written all over him, which is why the school’s headmaster takes him under his wing. I’m a huge fan of the ‘Louis Gossett Jr. mentoring a young white dude’ genre, which I first discovered in Iron Eagle.⁴ Gossett Jr. reprises the role here. There’s something about the setup that just works. He’s not going to let you get away with any shit, but he also secretly enjoys shenanigans. Frankly, Obi-Wan Kenobi could’ve used more Louis Gossett Jr. in his game.

Like many movies of its era, Toy Soldiers arises from and is secretly consumed with the relationship between kids and absentee parents. Gen X was going through it, and that was reflected in our movies. With enough distance, the plots of E.T., The Karate Kid, and The Lost Boys are the same: boy is abandoned by his father, boy fills the gap. I just randomly picked those movies from my mental lexicon. There are dozens of others with identical premises. The Last Crusade even retconned the entire franchise to give Indiana Jones daddy issues.

Toy Soldiers is the most daddy issue of daddy issue movies.

The characters are at a prep school specifically because their fathers are too important to parent. An entire school of kids struggling with deep-seated daddy issues, and Louis Gossett Jr. as a stern-but-fair surrogate father figure for them all. And then this whole scenario pops off because the terrorist’s daddy is in jail, which just goes to show that daddy issues know no bounds.

All of this was of great interest to young Eric, and remains so today. But in revisiting the film, mostly what I noticed is how it seems to have inspired the wild daydreams I have about singlehandedly averting danger anytime I leave the house.

Toy Soldiers wisely never has the teens fight the terrorists directly… because they’re just kids. The movie actually does a good job of balancing the inherent tension between ‘terrorists very bad’ and ‘teenagers stupid but brave.’ The teens fight back the only way they can—by trying to pass information to the FBI. It’s a quietly obstinate rebellion. Even as a kid, I recognized the story was more realistic than ones in which the teens become gun-touting heroes capable of stopping trained killers.⁵

What stuck with me was the courage and resourcefulness of these teenagers thrust into a dangerous situation. The bad guys invaded their school. The kids tried to find a way out.

For the past 30 years, I’ve been mentally playing my own version of Toy Soldiers. It’s not even intentional. I’ll be sitting in a theater waiting for a movie and start thinking about how to respond if some nutso bursts in and starts shooting up the place. It’s frankly not all that different from when I was a kid and imagined I was Batman. It’s silly. I know that. Still do it.

I think some of it is just trying to be prepared for gun violence in America. But I also know a deeper part of it—most of it, even—stems from movies like Toy Soldiers. Especially since being a hero didn’t mean being something I’m not. I’m not the guy to shoot up all the baddies. But outsmart them and escape? Maybe.

I watched Toy Soldiers when my mind was still malleable. An impression was formed. It remains.

I guess the lesson is: be careful exposing your children to a mulleted Sean Astin.

1. Posting a link to a Time article about a TikTok trend makes me feel sooooo old lol.

2. Including making wildly outrageous statements to the opposite sex (in this case, my wife).

3. Wild Bill Hickok famously played his last game of poker with his back to the door. It didn’t end well.

4. How I’ve gone this long without writing about Iron Eagle before is beyond me.

5. At the risk of shredding my remaining street cred, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Red Dawn. I’ll do you one better: I’ve definitely seen the Chris Hemsworth remake.