Chris Pine may be best known for his work in Star Trek and Wonder Woman, but just a few years ago, he starred in a forgotten action thriller that’s finally gaining attention on streaming. In 2022, Pine teamed up with Gillian Jacobs and Dean Ashton for The Contractor, the action film following a discharged Army special forces soldier who risks everything when he joins a private security contracting agency. In America, The Contractor is streaming exclusively on Paramount+, where it’s infiltrated the top 10 most popular movies chart. Alongside Pine and Jacobs, the film stars Ben Foster, Eddie Marsan, Florian Munteanu, and Kiefer Sutherland.
Why Did Chris Pine Make ‘The Contractor’?
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Pine stated that the story is grounded in a sobering, real-world truth about what happens to soldiers after the fighting ends. Through James Harper’s journey, the film highlights how many veterans struggle with trauma, isolation, and a lack of meaningful reintegration into civilian life. It points to alarming suicide rates and the mental health crisis facing service members, arguing that modern warfare sends people home too quickly, without time to process what they’ve endured. By framing Harper as a contractor forced into survival mode, the movie treats his arc not as an exception, but as a painfully common outcome of a broken system.
“I’d be remiss if I started speaking about stuff that I don’t really know enough about, but from the statistics and the investigations or the conversations I’ve had, there’s some figure that there are more self-inflicted gunshot wounds than there are deaths in theater [warfare] — at least there was at the time when we were shooting — which I think says a lot about the state of mental health with our service members,” said Pine, before continuing:
“There’s a wonderful book by Karl Marlantes called What It Is Like To Go to War. Karl is a Vietnam veteran, and he speaks so eloquently about death and violence and killing and being shot at. He also speaks eloquently about this idea that up until the ‘Jet Age,’ World War II maybe being the last, these warriors, after they had gone and battled, were put on a ship back home, which took a long time to get back home. It’d take a month. That’s a month with your comrades to decompress and process what you’d been through. But 1768859189, there doesn’t seem to be much communal psychosocial activity to reintegrate people — people who have been taught to kill, maim and be violent — back into a society which absolutely abhors that and does not allow that. So I think that is something that should be looked at.”
The Contractor is streaming now on Paramount+.
Release Date
April 1, 2022
Runtime
103 minutes
Director
Tarik Saleh
