SUPER SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY...
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You've been warned.
Things that were good:
- real HISS tanks!
- real Water Moccasins!
- real Cobra Commander outfit!
- a few other cool GI Joe-type vehicles, way better than ROC's garbage.
- no lips or rubber muscle suit on Snake Eyes.
- no stupid bouncing around the world in acceleration suits.
- The Rock is likeable on the screen, even if it's a little much.
- Storm Shadow is compelling and less silly in how they handle him without making him overly serious.
- uses its locations wisely, making honest set pieces rather than generic James Bond ripoff crap like ROC was.
- at least part of Cobra's big plan actually felt fresh and interesting, and even executed well.
- Zartan as the imitation President was done pretty well, got to chew scenery and be fun and over the top.
Things that could have been better:
- HISS tanks only raise their turrets and then get their asses kicked by a pair of tiny rockets.
- movie ends with a fistfight obviously because The Rock is the star, anticlimactic.
- Snake Eyes big ninja material.
- Firefly is here, not exactly in character and his gimmick is dumb with little exploding robot fireflies, but he's still somewhat kewl.
- still killing people left and right rather than red & blue lasers.
- Jinx gets an outfit based on her Sigma Six look, that's a weird callout.
- Snake's outfit is a bit bulky, his helmet is pretty big and his shoulder armor is a lot of bulk for a character that's supposed to be a martial artist.
- there are a lot of silly little plot gimmicks.
- Duke is actually likeable, but not in the movie much.
- Jon Chu got the most out of a clearly limited budget, but it's clear he could have done a lot more with a better budget and less studio and previous film bullshit.
- acting in general could have been better.
- final solution to the film is a button press moment at the last second.
- kinda stupid fare.
- super prison warden played by Justified's Walter Goggins channeling his inner Sam Rockwell, but some bits were ok so mixed rather than bad.
- nameless characters played by recognizable actors getting too little to do.
- story aims to do more than a single film should really try to do.
Things that sucked:
- RZA as Blind Master. I know he had love for the material, but almost anybody would have done better.
- post-processed 3D suuuuuucked, even with laser projection.
- "hooah!" instead of "Yo Joe!", and nothing instead of "COOOOOOBRAAAAAA!"
- not enough Joes or Cobras.
- Bruce Willis seems unhappy to be here and gives a piddling performance, horribly miscast, and his character is a ridiculous Deus Ex Machina.
- The President's chief of staff wears Baroness' glasses (from the original, not ROC) thus reminding us of what we don't have.
- Cobra's plan seems to be to destroy the majority of the planet, first they kill 1 hostage city then they decide to just fuck 'em all.
- Cobra Commander didn't do all that much.
- General Joe brings in a crowd of new guys that are geezers and have no names or personalities and fill the background without doing anything.
- the public knowing about GI Joe before Cobra's plan even.
- leaving out Baroness when she was such a major part of the first film was a mistake, should have been recast instead.
I gave the film a 6.5/10, it's the kind of movie to see with friends and then have fun bagging on while also enjoying the cartoony stuff what works.
Onslaught Six wrote:And guess who was excited enough about Rerterliation to go see it when it opened at his local shitty small-town theater? (Actually, this place rarely gets in big new movies even on the week of release, so this was a welcome surprise. $6 for a ticket, and even the snack prices weren't completely outrageous--more akin to convenience store prices than movie theater ones.)
Not unbearable. A buddy and I went to see it last night for the premiere of laser projection (it's brighter so the 3D doesn't look muddy), it was at the AMC version of Imax called ETX, $17.50 a ticket! $8 for a large popcorn, $5 for a water, $6 for a soda, and then the movie wasn't even that good; now I remember why I barely go to the fucking movies anymore.
Overall, it's a way better film than ROC was--in terms of actual filmmaking, and as a GI Joe movie. Things play out more or less as you expect them to--nothing is going to shock or surprise you.
Channing Tatum bites it definitively, despite rumours that the delay was enacted to edit him back in somehow. This is actually kind of unfortunate, because the opening ten minutes or so actually set him up to be pretty funny and likeable, unlike the last movie.
It becomes obvious that the problems of the last movie were the fault of the directing and writing team, who are all different on this go around. Some guys return, and some don't. Sometimes it's explained, and sometimes it isn't.
(For example, Destro appears, but is left behind in prison early on in the film for no explicable plot reason. Cobra Commander simply says that he's "out of the band.")
Definitely a better film than ROC despite having WAY less budget to work with. Jon Chu understood how best to use locations and pace together. As for the spoiler here,
Channing Tatum DID come back and reshoot, the scenes in Roadblock's house I suspect are the new material. Totally wasteful to have him get replaced by cardboard cutout man codename "NOT FLINT REALLY".
I think the problems of ROC are systemic, and this film suffers their baggage. Paramount made ROC as a big budget blockbuster film without consideration to the GI Joe-ness of it, they just had robot suits a million locations and tons of big-budget actors and a sense of making a "realistic" military fantasy adventure and slapped the GI Joe name onto it without consideration. This movie is saddled with not having most of those first movie characters because the actors are too expensive, and still stuck with that "realistic" military fetishism instead of a more loose GI Joe A Real American Hero aspect, and if they didn't have to have a few big draw stars that . I think if this director and producers here hadn't been burdened with that shit they could have made a much better film. Then again, the solution to the ending made no sense at all,
the satellites are in position with their payloads ready, it's a few seconds from launch, how would blowing up the satellites keep the indestructible tungsten rods from falling out of the sky? INDESTRUCTIBLE RODS FALLING, THAT WAS THEIR JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE!
This is GI Joe the way it's meant to be, though. We get a really kick-ass ninja mountain scene out of the deal. And anyone who was worried that this was going to be "too grounded" can stop worrying, because Cobra's big plot is to use satellites that drop tungsten rounds "800 times faster than a bullet" from the atmosphere. This apparently gives it enough force to destroy entire cities without any nuclear fallout. Zartan/The President (spoilers) tests it out on London.
The friend I went to see it with when we came out of the film said
"he's got an uzi on his hip, why doesn't he just spray all those red ninjas lined up on that mountain instead of whipping out his sword?"
and said friend is a HUUUUUUGE GI Joe fan.
What an odd way to be selective about how you're doing spoilers.
I feel like this was ALMOST the way to do a GI Joe movie. When they put out the word to have Joes come to the meeting, it should have been more than Snake and Jinx, there should have been a loose assortment of colorful characters like Shipwreck and Bazooka and Mutt and such, and then they're in the rec center around the ring and out comes Sgt. Slaughter. Would have been WAY better than General Deuce X. Machina and his gang of faceless geezers. Also, having Jinx do nothing, having Lady Jaye and Flint be utterly bland and generic cardboard cutouts, showing Destro but leaving him behind, having no Mjr. Bludd or Mindbender, having Firefly rip off his mask at every turn and acting more like Zartan than Firefly, that stuff missed the mark for me.
There's a lot of great character moments but I feel like the film kind of suffers from just having too much going on--it's trying to correct the mistakes of the film before it while also simultaneously doing a lot of new stuff and trying to keep things sorta-kinda in line with how GI Joe is supposed to be. It's like, there's no particular 'reason' why the Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow plotline had to coalesce in this film--the only thing that ties in is the reveal that
Zartan
was the actual killer of the Hard Master. So it kind of makes sense there, but it's like...I dunno, it kind of feels forced so we can get lots of ninja scenes in there (and a big-ass homage to GI Joe #21). Which, on the one hand--kudos for being great at that, and also convincing a studio to have 10-15 straight minutes of
no dialogue in it. But after it's done, they cut back to Roadblock and Flint and co trying to assassinate the President, and you're kind of like,
why did we just watch all that?
Suuuuper true. I didn't mind the no dialogue, that harkens back to the comic and also fits with Snake Eyes' personality, but it sure was a lot of it for a nebulous goal.
Still, it's obvious that director Jon Chu is a fan of the property and, even if he's a little green around the edges, he loves what he's doing and is passionate about it. There was also apparently a shitload of stuff cut out of the film (both Jinx and Firefly had much larger backstories, but in the film they just kind of exist; they also shot an entire flashback sequence detailing how Storm Shadow survived from his apparent death in ROC but it also got cut) so I wonder if there was a lot of studio interference because of the Battleship failure--it'd be hard to know for sure since Chu seems like the kind of guy who would keep his head down in front of cameras and interviews because he's just so damn glad to be working on the film period, and really wants to keep his job for the sequel.
Agreed about Chu, and glad to hear there's more content, hopefully it gets a release.
No. He and Destro were put into some weird cryo prison tubes inbetween the movies--the warden (who is a spectacular asshole!) describes them as being sedated with some kind of chemical that the body normally secretes during REM sleep to keep the body from "reacting to dreams."
Gamma-aminobutyric acid, that's a real thing, kind of clever even though the warden treated it like a torture. They goofed by saying it paralyzed everything but the heart and eyes, what about the LUNGS?!? The lungs still have to be able to work to process pumped in air. Simple oversight in dialogue though.
Dom wrote:Clearly, Hasbro does not want our money.
Movie is full of Joe-verse vehicles and Hasbro made none of them, instead reusing older vehicles, stuff I might have bought and now, nada.
I will try to read character names from the credits. If nothing else, I am curious about how many non-screen movie toy characters are mentioned in the movie.
Normally I read as many credits as I can, but the post-processed 3D made my eyes hurt and the effect continued into the black background with white text credits that weren't in 3D but still looked jerky without glasses because they were 2 polarized images.
Is there any indication that Storm Shadow was actually mind controlled? In the old US (and UK) comics, Storm Shadow was shown to scrupulously avoid killing when possible. He wanted to rise in Cobra's ranks, but avoided needless bloodshed, in some cases going so far as to anonymously warn his targets that he was coming for them.
No, he's acting of his own volition and even makes clear that he's still not a good guy, just that they have a common goal.
