Onslaught Six wrote:There's no indication of any mind control on SS in either movie. As I am given to understand it, Zartan assassinated the Hard Master and frames Storm Shadow, as a child, for it. Storm Shadow flees and conveniently, Zartan is there to take him in, training him to be an assassin. SS figures out, kind of poorly I'll add, that Zartan was the one who assassinated the Hard Master using some pretty basic deduction skills.
Maybe he remembered the horrible rubber makeup on the swordsmith.
I think they used the yellow to differentiate her from the Red Ninjas. Unless you're talking about the red outfit she had towards the end? (I have paid zero attention to Sigma Six. I'm one of those people who thought it should have been called Sigma Shit.)
No, she wears her red Jinx outfit with the blindfold at first, but then the black and yellow outfit in the ninja mountain scenes is based on her Sigma Six outfit. I liked Sigma Six actually, but it's not worth homaging in a GI Joe movie. Good toys, good accessories, show was middling to ok, but 2 out of scale scales hurt and the figures all wore similar outfits hurt.
It's funny, because all I've heard Ray Park talk about is how much more maneuverable and flexible this outfit was in comparison to the ROC one, but all I keep hearing is how everyone says it's "too bulky." I also saw Chu say in some interviews that there was a lot of weird studio people who didn't understand Snake Eyes as a concept--they questioned why the "black ninja" was the good guy instead of the bad guy, and also didn't understand that he was just a guy in a costume. They thought he was supposed to be a cyborg at some point. Chu apparently beefed up the costume design to make it clear that he was a man in a costume.
Reminds me of the Christian Bale Batman costume from BB to TDK. The idea that the execs thought it was a cyborg makes me sad and sick that these are the people in charge of movies.
I definitely agree with this. I think the whole film would have done better to ignore the ninja subplots entirely, throw Snake Eyes in with the main group, and go from there. Of course, I get the feeling Chu thought that this might be his only shot at the franchise (I have heard him say that if the movie doesn't make 4-500 million altogether, it won't get a third entry) so he might have been playing against that.
I think the ninja stuff is necessity to the fans of the '80s cartoon, but they spent so much time in it without enough payoff to justify it.
I really didn't understand his whole thing with repeatedly calling Lady Jaye "Brenda," and thought there must be some obscure old Bruce Willis injoke I'm missing.
That just seemed like a watered-down sexist joke that went nowhere, I don't think it was an in joke at all.
I really did not understand this at all. I don't even think I ever saw them after that first scene.
No, we did! There's a shot of one of them walking around a vehicle after a big battle scene, I think at the bunker when they rescue the president. Totally worth it.
The Joe team was all arrested for royally screwing up an operation in Paris in the last movie, remember? The Joe team being public knowledge is probably a thing.
Ah, I'll take your word for it, I forgot a lot of ROC... on purpose.
Rumours were abound that they were going to do a GI Joe The Movie style edit, though, and somehow miraculously reveal that Duke was alive at the end. Also, according to Chu, the reshoots happened months before the decision to pull the movie for 3D.
I think they shouldn't have considered that, he really isn't well-known or -liked enough as a character to justify it.
As for Flint, well, according to both Chu and Flint's actor (the name escapes me), this is supposed to be a younger, less experienced Flint.
And one with no personality?
I don't even understand why the button blows them up instead of just disabling them. Let's look at this for a second--Cobra Commander says, 'We're gonna launch these from the satellites on all of your cities. They are already moving into position.' The countries comply and give in to his demands, presumably surrendering control to him. So CC would...push the button and make the satellites all blow up, thus eliminating his only bargaining chip?
Shhh, don't think about it. Don't also think about the fact that he PUSHED THE WRONG BUTTON!!!! The little button NEXT to it was the one that was supposed to do both things, not the light itself. Keep in mind, the people who produced this movie thought Snake Eyes was a fucking robot.
Apparently a big reason why Destro was left behind was Chu felt like there were too many villains to focus on, and he's got a point--between Zartan, Storm Shadow, Cobra Commander and Firefly, everyone is fighting for screen time in the movie, and their roles are ill-defined. (Firefly at least gets to be 'the guy who fights Roadblock,' even if his role isn't much more than that. I still liked him because he looked damn cool.)
Here's the problem with that thinking, and it's pervasive in Hollywood, there's this belief that the audience won't be able to follow along with these sorts of characters without an origin story. So you get 2 Spider-Man origin movies in a decade, you get the same fucking Superman origin over and over, you get character origins out the asshole because the executards are stupider than most audiences. Destro, Major Bludd, all you need for the audience to follow along with you is to have them SAY AND DO THINGS CONSISTENT WITH THEIR CHARACTERS! But since, as you pointed out, this movie is full of ill-defined characterizations, they need to reinforce who they're supposed to be because they themselves have watered down the characters in the first place. You know who Spider-Man is? Watch any scene in any Spider-Man movie that has nothing to do with his origin and BOOM! That's who the fuck he is. Cobra Commander? Every single voice and action he takes, every over the top command, every nasty scheme, every cowardly retreat, that's who he is! The shit in ROC didn't make him a better character, it made him convoluted and awful (although better-acted). Who the fuck is Major Bludd? Watch the movie and FIND OUT!!! But nooooo. I have to apologize to people with mental retardation, I didn't mean to disparage you by lumping you in with Hollywood executives.
DOM wrote:I only recall a few vehicles from ROC. And, while the toys were underwhelming, I recall the basic concepts being pretty good.
You recall wrong, muthafatha! Mole pod? Boring and singular usage.
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/molepod/
Pit? Bland and flimsy and not much fun.
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/pit/
Cobra Gunship? What's fun about this boring, featureless box?
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/gunship/
Night Raven? I had this, it's small and it's a toy gun dressed up like a miniature Night Raven with less features and shitty lights and sounds:
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/nightraven/
Rockslide? Not much detail or weapons or sense:
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/rockslide/
Steel Crusher? I still have this for its MASK appeal, it's an H2 Hummer that has a few movable bits, it's ok but not that exciting:
http://www.yojoe.com/vehicles/09/steelcrusher/
and I think that's all ROC's new molds.
Ninjas have always been a big part of "GI Joe". Aside from the pre-movie cartoon, the ninjas were a constant. (Later episodes of the cartoon took their cues from the superior comics, which was basically "GI Joe: Greek Tragedy with Ninjas".)
You have to see the movie to understand what I mean, I guess. There's just too much of it compared to what you get out of it, it doesn't really earn its gravitas and screentime just to get a rather middling payoff.
Fuck red and blue lasers. Seriuosly. Given the amount of gun and artillery play in "GI Joe", I expect somebody to die every so often.
It's constant, and it's Joes killing Americans (mercs, but acting as American military and secret service, not clear delineation on where Cobra got their troopers, could be from the US Military). Also, it's kind of hard to have fun with and empathize with happy-go-lucky Joes who just moments before perforated people and sending folks falling to painful, slow deaths.
There are plenty of possible (and workable) back-writes for this, the most obvious being that "Cobra Commander is stark raving bug fuck crazy and cannot conceive of a scenario where he wins a more or less intact planet for himself and thus feel obligated to destroy a significant amount of infrastructure". But, that is priobably way more effort than the writers of the actual movie put in to the logic of the plot. (All the same, we can probably expect a later writer/editor to use something like this to paper over things.)
It shouldn't be a question in the back of the audience's mind, it shouldn't need a retcon or after-action correction. All this was was the writers too lazy to set up a credible threat without a stupid, lazy ticking-clock ending. The more they make these sorts of movies so shittily, the more you realize how lucky we were to have PROFESSIONAL, THOUGHTFUL writers working on our second-rate '80s cartoons.
Recasting carries other complications though. "Bawwww, that is not the right ___________!!!1!" And, I can see why they left out a character who was a big part of a failed movie.
Bah! She sucked in the first film and her absence was felt, even if her original story arc in ROC was garbage. Recast would have been fine, have the new bitch retcon that whole shit into the grave - the other one was a ripoff of her, hired to act as a duplicate while she stayed behind the scenes. She adds a lot of character and color to the ranks, and is very recognizable to the brand. Plus, now we don't get girl fights except with some old bat.
Fucktards yacking on cell-phones have just about killed the movies for me. (Seriously, if movie house snipers limited themselves to that type of theatre-goer, society would support them more.)
The ETX theater here was one of the largest movie theaters I've ever seen, and there are seats EVERYWHERE available as it's so expensive. Yet 1 minute after we take our seats, a group of 4 asshats sits RIGHT behind us and blathers like idiots through the trailers and here and there through the film, and they're wrong about EVERYTHING they say.
My impression of "Rise of Cobra" was that most everybody involved wanted to do the best possible job. They not only brought in Hama, but they listened to him. That is more effort than I would normally expect for this type of movie. But, for various reasons, it did not work.
Uhhhh, no. Stephen Sommers was making "generic action film 2009" and I think they brought in Hama for fan cred and also due to it testing horribly from so little Joe. Sommers wasn't a Joe fan, he liked the idea of making a James Bond-type film. It didn't work because there was nobody in a position of power who had any interest in GI Joe at all, and it shows on screen in every minute of the film, makes the goddamned Transformers piece of shit movie look like fanfic by comparison.
Is there any in-movie logic to explain this, or is it purely "rule of stupid"?
It's vaguely possible but it wasn't clearly shown, so it didn't pay off. We just had a big scene with the gun too so it had a lot of impact from being there, and it's not hard to reload an uzi.
It sounds like they had too many characters as it is. Why would they then put more characters in?
You mistake background extras and cardboard-written nobodies for characters. The movie could have handled a lot more characters, the budget really is felt over that, they didn't all need big STORY impact to have personal moments.
It sounds like they included Firefly as some kind of "obligatory" character (maybe because of his connection to the Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow/Zartan dynamic), but forgot what made him important in the first place. Mindbender was in the first movie. Cobra Commander mentions him by name and he is shown in a flash-back. But, the credits list him as Hundenkindter (sp?), which is the name of the plastic surgeon that restored Baroness' face in the comics.
In ROC, Mindbender IS Cobra Commander.
As for vehicles, the simple fact is that using moulds that are ~30 years old is bad form. I do not care how far ahead of the times that the old Joes were back then. There is no reason for tooling from the 1980s to be released as part of anything other than a nostalgia line. Toys for summer blockbuster movie should use new tooling.
The thing of it is, a lot of the vehicles from the '80s are more detailed, more fun, and more popular with both kids and collectors than the modern lines. Water Moccasin still holds up (they retooled it to all new tooling after it finally wore out, but it's virtually identical to the original), SHARC is still well-liked despite being somewhat... limited (and that's coming from someone who owns 3), Snow Cat, Firebat, those and a few others still get re-released and sell while new-tool toys from ROC ate dick at market, and a lot of product over the last 15 years hasn't measured up either.
Ah, they managed to ruin one of the things that made Storm Shadow work.
Mind control is a bigger cheat and I'm glad they didn't use that, Baroness in the last movie proved how worthless that is on-screen.
maybe seeing this on Sunday.
I look forward to hearing what you think, hopefully you see it with a friend or 2, that's the best way to see it.
