Small Soldiers is a nostalgic favorite of the 1990s, even if the movie was largely dismissed by critics. The movie came from Joe Dante, the director best known for Gremlins, and it is not hard to see similarities between that classic movie and Small Soldiers. It is another movie in which things run amok from some small and unassuming threats, as some greedy executives at a toy company use state-of-the-art microchips implanted in GI Joe-like soldier toys to make them more exciting, only for the toy soldiers to think they are real commandos on a mission.