valis2 | GI Joe: the Bullet Point Review. (Reply)

gina_r_snape, you were right. It was...not good. I'm a longtime Joe fan, so I was looking forward to this movie, until I found out that Stephen Sommers directed it, and I heard the not-so-stellar word-of-mouth. Still, I thought it might be fun, at the very least.

So last night the majestic

bookwench2096, Husband, and I went to see it. Let's just count the ways we laughed. And said, "Bwuh?"

First of all, Stephen Sommers is responsible for one of my favorite movies ever, and the first fandom I ever truly wrote fanfic in, the Mummy. As usual for SS, we had some Mummy shout-outs. First, Henderson as a bodyguard in the beginning. Then Brendan Fraser/Rick O'Connell had a completely pointless cameo that really had too much frenetic stuff going on behind it. (I think he even had the eye of Horus tattoo!) Third, Arnold Vosloo/Imhotep/El Mummioso was Zartan. Lastly, Beni shows up as the mad scientist who teaches Cobra Commander the tricks of the trade. Also, one line from the Mummy: "They will never stop." And desert scenes. Zartan with the camels!

Let's see. I have seven pages of notes here, people, give me a second to sort this out. Okay. So instead of nanotechnology, they called it "nanomites," perhaps because they were afraid people wouldn't understand teeny tiny robots. They must have figured that people would have a better chance of understanding teeny tiny vermin. As a demonstration, the bad guys launch a billion-dollar nanomite explosive at a tank, and the nanomites then eat the metal and reduce the tank to nothingness pretty quickly. But not so quickly that I could understand why they'd be wasting their time with nanomites and not just hit it with a rocket launcher. I guess that would be too cost-effective and then we wouldn't have this movie.

The girl who plays the Baroness doesn't know how to walk in heels. No, I am serious. Maybe it's just that particular pair of heels (they were pretty extreme), but holy cow. It distracted me so much that I couldn't stop wishing she'd just develop a jet pack and fly around instead.

What the hell is with Joe Headquarters? Why is it in Egypt? Isn't that a little too removed? And...if it's really under the Sahara...then WHERE THE HELL DID ALL OF THE WATER COME FROM?! Did they import it in? Blast a channel to a convenient nearby sea, and then convince the sand to somehow NOT become a giant sinkhole? And what's the point, except to make everything more difficult and expensive for the Joes?

The main two characters, Ripcord and Duke, are Army boys who end up joining the Joes. In one of their "training" scenes they get in submersibles and then basically play an underwater Quidditch match. The only thing missing is Lucius's hat.

Storm Shadow, the evil ninja, wanders into Joe headquarters with Zartan and the Baroness. The Baroness wanders off. Zartan kills Hawk's girl wonder secretary, and then says to Storm Shadow, "Oh, that's right, you don't kill women." Storm Shadow replies, "But for you, Zartan, I'd make an exception." I am still puzzling this out. 1) Zartan isn't a woman. 2) Zartan isn't a woman.

The makeup was weird for the female characters. Huge rouge-y spackled patches of blush. Also, Scarlett wears about ten tons of eye makeup. I mean, she was kind of a girly girl, but still. It's a little much.

My biggest WTF moment: As we tour the Joe facilities, one character is shown putting on a thermal optic suit or something like it. You know, an invisibility cloak. lol. Anyway, obviously this is a gun on the mantel that has to come into play later, and it does when Scarlett is attacking the Baroness. The Baroness is kicking ass and has Scarlett overpowered. There is a chain around Scarlett's neck and the Baroness is strangling her from behind. So Scarlett switches on the suit, and becomes invisible. Which, first of all, is not much of a help during strangling, and seems a teensy bit OOC for my mental version of Scarlett, but let's not quibble over that. The point is that the invisibility apparently surprises the Baroness so much that she lets go. Um, WHY?! It's not like she became AIR or something. She merely blinked out of sight. And the Baroness is holding her. I mean, seriously, WTF.

Mini!Storm Shadow is the Tiny Ant King from Tropic Thunder! hee!!

I really want to pull out my GI Joe Order of Battle book and look everyone up, because this is messing with my head something fierce. Where is Flint? Where's Gung Ho? Where's Wild Bill? Roadblock? Leatherneck? And just who the hell were half of them? Heavy Duty? huh? Seriously, there was not enough time spent establishing identities, damnit! That's what the best part is! The crazy names! The unique gear! grah. And Lady Jaye! Where was she? And why wasn't Scarlett dating Duke? Where was Zartan's swamp buggy?

How is it that the super suits that Ripcord and Duke wore actually fit them, considering they'd joined only four hours before? Who keeps million dollar suits on hand just for the remote possibility that two guys might blackmail their way onto your team? And why outfit your least experienced members with these suits? It seems to me that putting a couple of the regular Joes in those would basically be a slam dunk.

While the bad guys were crashing through the streets of Paris in their Hummer, Snake Eyes is hanging off the roof. The Baroness figures out that he's on the roof, and then presses a handy Ninja On the Roof button, and a big blade comes out of the front of the Hummer. I turned to Husband and said, "Oh, wow!! A ninja scooper!" Too bad it was just a regular car scooper that kept scooping cars up and launching them over the roof so that Snake Eyes could show off his terrific ninja moves. I feel that the movie could only have been improved with the addition of a real ninja scooper.

Best Obvious Design Flaw: Duke is racing through Paris in his Super Suit, chasing the Baroness, who has the killswitch for the nanomites on her belt. It's the size of a small plate and has a huge red touchpad on it, along with the word "KILLSWITCH" in large green letters. Isn't that rather a stupid design for something you don't want someone to press? I mean, seriously, it was like Duke was playing the ultimate game of touch football, and he just basically runs up and whacks it. If I had been designing the killswitch, it would have looked like a package of peanut butter crackers or something. Half-eaten. And it would have had an unkillswitch built in in case some big killjoy good guy hit the killswitch.

So the Cobra Commander has created twenty "Vipers." They are the ultimate human-as-weapon creations. They're fully programmed to feel no pain, they're full of nanomites, they can heal, etc. They're controlled by Cobra Commander and his little touchpad o' evil. The good guys kill one of the Vipers by dropping a house--er, a Hummer on him. The viper has a little lapel camera that is a direct link to the Cobra Lair. Breaker taps into the viper's brain with two large meat thermometers, and then tries to download his last thoughts. Then, Breaker pretends that he couldn't get the images, and the viper's brain implodes. Everybody is all distressed until Breaker reveals--only joking! He knew there was a camera there all along! Except he does this right in front of the camera. Which he has not turned off.

Snake Eyes doesn't talk because he took a vow of silence. But he does text. The vow of nontexting is hellahard to keep.

The Baroness: "Everybody's sorry about something." Husband: "I'm sorry I paid $8.50 to see this."

I was pissed to find out that the Baroness had feelings and was all sorry and crap. I would rather have seen her take her badass self to the end and stay unrepentant.

Scarlett: "That's a Night Raven! They actually built one!" Er, okay, so does this mean that there are blueprints hanging out somewhere--most likely on the internet--for a really amazing kickass fancy plane that everyone covets but no one ever builds? Which makes so much sense when you think about it.

Duke's enunciation is absolutely horrible. I could barely understand what he was saying. "I'm gonna git yu outta here!"

Turns out the Baroness is a viper! Oh noes! And she overrode the program with Twu Wuv! She was only Mostly Programmed.

The Cobra Lair is under the polar ice cap! What is it with water and these people? No wonder the Joes had their watery base, so the audience wouldn't be surprised by their sudden aquatic prowess later on in the film. Well, if any of them were still receiving signals in their cerebral cortex by that point.

The Cobra Lair has a huge Death Star pulse cannon! Watch the towers, we're drawing heavy fire. Stay on target...

"It's all up to the Joes now," said the President of the United States, played by Jonathon Pryce, who still has nightmares about this dialogue.

Ripcord gets into the Raven X-Wing Fighter and goes after the nanomite missiles, which were launched at ~~four~~three major cities. He catches up to one of the missiles, and realizes that there are, um, no firing controls. "How do I fire?" he asks Scarlett, who is on the bridge of the Freezy Pop Cobra Lair. Scarlett says that it must have voice controls! So Ripcord starts shouting out "Fire" and stuff like that. Then Scarlett realizes that the words must be in Gaelic because clearly the jet is Destro's! Um, first of all, why would we make that assumption? It could just as easily have been the Baroness's jet. Anyway, secondly, the technology in this plane is supposedly incredibly advanced, yet there is no voice pattern analyzer to notice that the voice is not Destro's? Seriously, he must have assumed he was always going to park it in a good neighborhood. But wait--how the hell does the system even know WHAT TO FIRE AT?! It's not like he's shouting "Fire at the missile!" He's just shouting "Fire!" in Gaelic. And also, he did not specify which weapon to fire. He's lucky he didn't launch the Marshmallow Bunny Sparkly Rainbow Shower Sunshine Cannon.

There is so much broken glass in this movie that I began to wonder if they had a magical broken glass dispensing fountain on the set and they had to make use of it constantly because it was so expensive.

Duke finally takes pity on the actress who plays the Baroness (and me! I nearly cried in relief) and carries her through the soggy glassy mess of the Klondike Cobra Lair--clearly her boots don't grip in the wet. He shoots his way out of the base with her gun. There's something Freudian about that, but I'm not going there.

Storm Shadow vs. Snake Eyes--very nice, except why the hell did Storm Shadow make one large unwieldy blade out of his two more lithe short blades? And it looks like they stole the set directly from LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER and NO! BEN!!!! Seriously. I kept expecting Alec Guiness to wander out from behind the central machine and say, "It's as if a million voices cried out, and then went silent. That's how bad this movie is."

Why did the Baroness have so much personality? The other vipers didn't. She was pretty independent-thinking, too. She was fairly well-versed in her past history and current emotional state for someone injected with lots and lots of teeny tiny vermin and controlled by a touchpad o' evil.

Ripcord ejects in the "upper atmosphere" in a cloud of nanomites who supposedly eat metal, yet none of them bother him, his parachute harness or even his fillings.

Cobra Commander's mask in the cartoon was actually better than the movie mask. And since his mask in the cartoon was kind of lame, you can do the math here. Speaking of which, why wait until the very end to do all the masking? Isn't it more exciting to wear them in the beginning?