Monday, May 26, 2014

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

SPOILER WARNING!!! This post spoils movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009).

There are movies, I know, I don't like as soon as I hear about them. This is one of them. Movie is based on toys, cartoons and comics. I am most familiar with the comics. They were released as Action Force in Finland. I am not sure, if toys had same name. Probably they were. Cartoons I remember watching had name G.I. Joe. Movie had original title in Finland. Only characters I remember from comics and cartoons were Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. Later I have seen few cosplay versions of Baroness. But I have no memory, what she was in source material.

I expected this to be stupid, but not this stupid. I am going to spoil most of the twists, because they are stupidest things in this movie. Story between Snake Eyes ans Storm Shadow is from source material. That is least the stupid thing in this story.  When they add anything of their own, it will get really stupid.

Main character is Duke and his comical sidekick is Ripcord, played by Marlon Wayans. Duke proposes his girlfriend Ana before going to mission with Ripcord and Ana's brother Rex. Ana says yes on one condition. He has to bring her brother back from mission. During mission Duke calls strike on house and sends Rex to house. He does these things in this order. First call strike and then send Rex to house. This script passed many eyes and it had that thing in it. Duke give Rex five minutes, but house is bombarded almost as soon as Rex goes in. What have they achieved, if bombardment happened when scheduled? Five minutes is short time and whole thing put Rex unnecessary danger.

House had time bending properties. Rex found high-tech lab there. He downloaded everything to memory stick and had short conversation with scientist, he found there. This took more time than, what happened outside. Scientist locked vault and they barely survived the bombardment. Bombardment destroyer Rex's face and he became evil scientist. It felt more like he became evil scientist during conversation with scientist. Rex goes underground. Duke and Ana think, he died in bombardment. Duke can't face Ana after this. Ana breaks down. Rex inject her with nanobots, which make her Baroness, mindless servant of his boss McCullen.

McCullen has plans for world domination. He is a weapons dealer, who gets funding from NATO. He wants his latest weapon to himself. He wants to steal it from NATO. No point making more weapons in his plant. He should have knowhow and equipment. For some reason four warheads are only ones ever made. When he gets warheads, he launches them to make people fear him. After he has used warheads, why should people fear him? NATO should know, he has used every warhead he has and they should know, where they were launched. Warheads contained unstoppable nanobots. Only specific signal stops them. McCullen's plan assumes NATO doesn't know how to launch that signal. It is stupid to create doomsday weapon with only one cancelling signal device and keep cancelling signal devices at same place, where doomsday weapons are. No backups for cancelling.

When McCullen got warheads back, he couldn't arm them without help from civilian scientist. He didn't have means to arm weapons he made, but he could build underwater base under arctic. With all his technology, arming his own weapons shouldn't been a problem.

After lot of cgi action, Baroness and Storm Shadow take Duke to McCullen's base. There McCullen beats Duke. When Baroness sees this, she starts to fight against her nanobots and ultimately wins. She gets back to her normal self. Rex threatens to kill her, if Duke doesn't give up. Rex's character doesn't make any sense. He was one of the good guys until he stepped into high-tech lab. After that he started to work for McCullen, who owned the high-tech lab. I don't know, why that lab was on war zone, but that is another problem.  Then he makes her sister mindless servant of McCullen. He even threatens to kill her. In the end he injects something to McCullen, which makes McCullen his servant. After that he becomes Cobra Commander, which is main villain of G.I. Joe. I assumed McCullen would become Cobra Commander. It made very little sense, when Rex became Cobra Commander. There was no real character development. There were no real reasons why he changed.

There were no character development for any other character either. Marlon Wayans' character was his generic character we have seen in other movies. He tries to hit on Scarlett, who first resists, but then gives up. Duke is generic whole time. Almost nothing happens to him, even when story gave change for that. Baroness was just brainwashed. Movie didn't use her mystery any way. She just breaks her brainwashing. Before that there was one scene hinting Baroness may still care about Duke. Nobody else has anything. McCullen is so generic, his only character trait is his accent.

I don't get into everything stupid in action scenes. One thing I have to mention. In last battle ice sinks into ocean. Ice sinks into ocean. Rex explodes ice above underwater base and ice start to sink into ocean. Everything else is as unrealistic. I hate cgi action. This has almost nothing but cgi action. Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have interesting action scenes as kids and as adults. Those were refreshing in middle of all stupidity and cgi.

Movie is kind of what you expect from movie based on action figure toys.  Just stupider. There was attempt to make characters deeper, but it failed miserably. They should have dropped all attempts to make characters deeper or given more time them. Action scenes were too stupid and too unrealistic. Whole movie is just a mess.


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