The latest trailer for the upcoming G.I. Joe movie comes off as more a comedy than an action flick that wants to be taken seriously.
Stephen Schleicher
Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment. You can follow him on Twitter @MajorSpoilers and tell him your darkest secrets...
17 Comments
I cringe every time I see something that pertains to this. I hope it does well (as to not sting my childhood more than it has) but I will not be seeing it.
Having read the comic adaptation, I’m not worried.
Jacin: you make a good point. All the answers to the GI Joe movie can be found in the IDW series.
That makes me feel better….I didn’t want to read the IDW adaption for fear of “spoiling” the movie. The sad thing is that I’m very excited about this movie. When I was a kid in the 80’s the three comics I made sure I bought regularly was Amazing Spider-Man, G.I. Joe, and the Transformers. Let’s hope it ain’t 2 out of 3….
My five year old son is really excited about it. That should speak volumes.
If only they could drop the armors…
This is not the GI Joe of my youth. Mine looked like Franco Harris and had Kung-Fu Grip.
Where’s Shipwreck?
Dude … this movie is going to be horrible … why doesn’t any one realize this? There is a Waynes Brother in it for Pete’s Sake!!!
@Brian: First it’s the “Wayans” brother, and he’s the one of the pack that was in Requiem for a Dream.
Hey I know, he must be an atrocious actor to be in one of the finest movies of the last decade.
To add an extensive addendum to my previous comments, let me say this: Don’t go into it expecting The Dark Knight because it’s not anywhere near that level.
Based on the comic and without seeing anything but the previews, I’d put it a notch above the Transformers movies (which, in all honesty, I didn’t think was nearly as bad as most critics did).
But, c’mon, let’s be honest with ourselves for a few minutes, okay?
As adults looking back fondly on something that we loved from our childhood, we’ve built G.I.Joe up into something it never actually was.
Case in point: I got some of the 25th anniversary stuff for my son for his birthday and, among those, were some old DVDs of the stuff we used to watch as a kid. The stories that they’ve included in these box sets were the best G.I.Joe stories of our “good ol’ days.”
It’s not nearly as awesome as I remembered it being.
In one, G.I.Joe fought a group of terrorists (all following a famously inept leader) who built a machine (the MASS device) that controlled the weather and still worked after it blew up so the Joes had to go around collecting the parts of the machine (which had managed to get spread all over the planet) to fix the machine and shut it down.
Then, that same group of terrorists also gathered the DNA of all of the famous dictators and tyrants and tossed them in a blender to make a newer and braver (yet still inept) leader — because he was lacking Sun Tzu’s DNA — and dressed him up like a giant golden snake and put him on a flying chariot.
Oh, and why was Serpentor created in the first place? Because aliens from Cobra-La, a lovecraftian environment buried deep in the Himalayas, were upset because Cobra Commander hadn’t managed to eradicate the human race for being ecologically unfriendly yet, and the biological weapon spores that this Cobra-La group created turn the actual cobra commander into an actual giant snake.
They could’ve put that on the screen (again), sure, complete with and after-the-credits scene having Dennis Quaid and Marlon Wayans scolding some kids over their not wearing helmets while riding their bikes and it would’ve been just like the good ol’ days.
But, would you have gone and seen it? I wouldn’t have. If they had gone that route, we’d be even more disappointed by the outcome; those stories weren’t nearly as awesome as we remember them. We wouldn’t buy any of that as a comic story now, and I don’t think that there’s anyone on the planet that would pay to go see any of it as a movie, but as kids we ate it up.
So, based on the IDW adaptation, I think that the movie should do a reasonable job of keeping all of the outlandish things that G.I.Joe was while modernizing it enough to make it at least as believable to us now as adults as it was to us back then as kids.
Don’t go into it looking to criticize and you should have fun. If you do go in looking to criticize, keep in mind just how outright dumb a lot of the stories that the G.I.Joe comics and cartoons were back in the ’80s and this movie would still be ten times better than any of those …
It should turn out to be a decent, popcorn-and-action summer movie full of guns and explosions and a reasonably decent story to tie it all together.
I would pay big money to see a live action “MASS Device” movie.
i’m not disappointed because it will be a bad g.i.joe movie, i just think this is gonna be a plain old BAD movie. i honestly don’t care about if it’s the g.i.joe or any other super team. it just look really, really bad to me. (wayan brothers… come on).
@Jacin: YES!!!!
Preach on, brother.
I’ve been hammering this movie for months, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve begun to turn the corner. It was right around when I caught The Mummy on cable and it made me realize how much fun that movie was, and I sat through the whole thing commercials and all.
I’m not expecting a lot from it … just explosions, ninjas, and Rachel Nichol’s boobies. And to second @Jacin … the 80s cartoon was great fun and the comic series is phenomenal. If you haven’t I urge you to pick up some out of the dollar bin, some twenty years later Hama still kicks ass.
Jacin B….that was awesome. Whoever is distributing this movie should hire you for PR. But your comments are so right on the Monday. I find the experience going back and watching cartoons and reading certain comics from my youth pales in comparison to the romanticized memories I’ve created for myself. If the movie comes somewhere close to Larry Hama’s conception of G.I. Joe…I’ll be okay.
It looks like the writers took more inspiration from the 80’s cartoon than from Larry Hama’s comic books.