|
|
OK. This one here could end up getting aborted halfway though. It's the live action G.I. Joe movie. I'm just expecting a standard modern action movie out of this, but the thing is, standard modern action movies these days have a 50% chance of being the most insane and messed up things you're going to see this side of, well, the other stuff I do consciousness streams for... which I suppose puts them on the same side and invalidates the premise but whatever. Point is, could be nothing special, could be crazy. This is one of those DVDs that forces you to watch trailers though. We've got one for Avatar M. Night Shamalamading-dong's The Last Airbender though which... actually looks like a totally faithful direct adaptation. Weird. We can still bash the racist casting though I guess. Then there's a reminder of how traumatic that second live action Transformers was, and the new Star Trek thing, and then finally, we are allowed to watch the movie.
I should probably note that I didn't grow up a G.I. Joe fan, at all. I saw an awful lot of it because it was back to back with Transformers while I was waking up and eating breakfast and such, but even as a kid, I thought it was kinda beneath me. Also, "France: 1641." Uh... wait wait wait. Are you trying to suggest here that movie-Destro is some sort of immortal version of the Man in the Iron Mask? Because that'd kinda be cool... also HOLY SMURF IT'S THE DOCTOR! Specifically, it's the 9th Doctor. You know, the one with the military hair and the leather jacket from the first season of new Doctor Who. He's giving some sort of presentation to the U.N. about how he's manufacturing grey goo nanite based weaponry or something. I wasn't really paying attention because I was still reeling from seeing the man in the iron mask and then cutting to The Doctor. Anyway, now here's a couple generic military guys making small talk. One of them is named Duke, so I suppose these are our main characters... and suddenly some kind of UFO comes out of nowhere and starts firing big ol' energy blasts at the helicopters escorting their caravan, and outmaneuvering their missiles and generally being snazzy.
|
Then it lands and some robo-troopers with laser cannons get out, along with The Baroness from G.I. Joe (the first recognizable character to appear), who the surviving army dudes start firing rocket launchers and machine guns at to no avail. OK, remember when I said this movie would either be boring or insane? We're going with insane. Totally. We've just got crazy sci-fi laser cannons and what may be cyborgs and techno-goggles and a random ninja dropping out of the sky and some random girl with some sort of laser crossbow and this is all just totally out of nowhere with no explanation given. Oh, and we also have a black australian dude with a crazy huge gun plopping down a spike that emits a holographic Dennis Quaid to say "You there! Main character! I'm recruiting you into my secret high tech good guy organization!"
Onward to Egypt! OK, we are like 5 minutes into this movie or so, and we've already totally met our WTF quotient. Also, this is reminding me WAY too much of Team America, which I expect to be a vibe it will continue to emit for some time. At least through the rest of this whole welcome to our secret base scene. So here we've got some nice simple generic action movie exposition I can safely ignore but seriously, the first five minutes or so of this movie are just total insanity. Total non-sequitur flashback to 400 years ago. Then bam, here's all kinds of crazy sci-fi stuff that would have me believe this is set a few hundred years in the future if they didn't kinda come right out and say otherwise. Anyway, it turns out The Doctor is the badguy. He kinda has some crazy plan where he makes superweapons, sells them to... the U.N. I guess, and then uses his secret robo-army to steal them and return to his secret fortress at the bottom of the ocean. See how we just seemlessly slipped back into crazy land there? Anyway, he might also have a twin here, but he definitely has this cyborg mad scientist type working for him, who has some sort of crazy cobra venom-nanite hybrid stew he injects into dudes to make them into supersoldiers, so yeah, they're just storm troopers, not robots, but that's still pretty weird.
|
Meanwhile, back in Joe H.Q., the team uses I.NT.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. to compare the Baroness' photo with... every photo anywhere in the world, but Duke says "uh, you don't actually have to do that. We used to date. I even coincidentally still have her picture right here, see?" Anyway, these days she's apparently married to some french billionaire and... wow that's a weirdly over-exaggerated hip sway there. Like, Bayonetta level. Meanwhile, 4 years ago, when it was apparently the 40s or something, here's Duke proposing to Baroness here. Who hasn't actually been referred to as such that I noticed, but I kinda missed her actual name, and more to the point I don't care. Also, we just shoehorned in the third really awkward line of dialog. So far we've had "kung-fu grip" "and knowing is half the battle" and "a real American hero" all REALLY awkwardly slipped in. AND NOW IT'S TIME TO WEAR POWER ARMOR! Who the heck edited this movie? I don't know if they did a really good job or a really terrible job, but any time it looks like we're going to slow down and have some plot, we suddenly cut away to something totally insane. I mean, explaining the features of the power armor was getting boring I guess, so now we have to start sparring with technobattons that make light saber noises and use some sort of crazy hologram videogame gun range thing and piloting some sort of mini-sub through rings and is that Brendan Fraiser for no reason? Is anyone not in this movie?
Oh, and now the token chick of the group is working out in the gym while reading an arbitrary Smart People book. Other newbie hits on her. "Attraction is an emotion. Emotions are not based in science, and if you can't quantify or prove something exists, in my mind it doesn't. Actual quote. OK, so our token chick is being established as Nerd Girl by going What is this thing you humans call "Love?" And suddenly we have some sort of ... oh of course. Crazy digging machines that are like half huge drill half motorcycle burrowing through the sand to sneak some Cobra dudes into secret G.I. Joe HQ. Crazy violence ensues. Also, guy who looks way too much like but is apparently not also played by The Doctor is apparently named Zartan. Anyway, it's pretty much just him, Baroness, and this totally white clad ninja dude attacking, oh, plus some generic goons. We're also officially calling these Mole Pods. By the way, now that I see them with good lighting, these generic Cobra guys totally have this Army of Two look going. So suddenly mid-fight scene our white clad evil ninja and black clad good ninja start fighting so Whitey says "Hello brother!" and we suddenly have like a 2 second flashback of them ninja-fighting when they were like, 8. We also have our two token girls fighting, in girls fighting fashion. Then good token girl escapes from being choked out with a chain by activating her cloaking device. OK, it was already totally established that she had a cloaking device, but uh... you can't lose track of someone when you're choking them, so how did this work? Then the badguys, having successfully stolen the nanite missiles they escape via personal back-mounted jet backpack. I say jet backpack and not jetpack because, well, wings pop out of it.
|
We then briefly cut to the president being briefed on this, really briefly, it's like 10 seconds tops, basically just long enough to establish that he's played by that guy who plays the authority figure in like every Terry Gilliam movie. Then we jump back into ninja flashback land, because there was amusement to be had there and now that we're as calm as this movie gets, it's an OK time to hop back to that. So flashing back to a really hilariously over the top version of Tokyo that has shrines and pagodas and paper lanterns wedged between sky scrapers, we have some punk kid, presumably our black ninja, sneaking into someone's pagoda through the back door to the kitchen to steal from the ridiculously huge bowl of rice and counter covered in fish. Little White Ninja sees him and they have this crazy knock-down drag out brawl that's actually sufficiently well done that I had to stop and give it my full attention then pause it to explain it here. Then his wise master comes in and says stop we're going to train him, and we cut immediately to The Doctor explaining how yeah the man in the iron mask there really was Destro. Destro McCullen. From France. Uh... yeah.
So uh... moving on? Zartan here is apparently Decoy Octopus, and they're getting ready to Valmorphinize him with their crazy mad science tray of nanine needles to magically transform him into someone. He spots and removes the memory rewriting unit of the array and takes it out though, saying he doesn't need that thanks. I figure if you can totally reconfigure someone's face and memories though, them being a master of disguise on top of that is kinda overkill, isn't it? And continuing with rapidfire exposition, her actual name is Baroness Anna DeCobray. We've got some weird Double Bubble product placement in the middle of a war in uh... Egypt? 4 years ago... and... you know, movie? Apparently you don't understand how this whole editting process works. Let me try to explain. You shoot a whole bunch of scenes, and you end up with way more movie than you can cram in and still have a reasonable running time. What you're supposed to do is you find all the scenes thatt don't have anything at all to do with anything, and you just leave them out completely. I know you worked hard on them, but it's for the best. What you seem to be doing instead is just isolating the most important part of every scene, and trimming away everything else, and making sure you keep every scene in there. Now, it's cool that you know how to do that, but it's not a good thing to do.
|
So yeah, Baroness is assaulting her husband's crazy high tech underground research lab to force him to "weaponise" the warheads they stole. This involves all kinds of lasers and flashing lights and hovering and spinning and glowing and flashing light tubes for some baffling reason. Then white ninja kills him with his Assassin's Creed wrist blade thing. Meanwhile, the Joes are suiting up in power armor in a van and plugging Double Bubble more. And now we have dudes in power armor running down crowded streets bouncing off cars while other people, since, I guess, they just had the two suits and decided to let the newbies have them, are jumping onto the backs of random vehicles and zooming around on motorcycles and jumping through the Arc de Triumph. I think I also saw the Eiful Tower in there so I just have to say it. AMERICA! @#$% YEAH! COMIN ALONG TO SAVE THE MOTHER$@#%IN' DAY YEAH! And yeah, that's the Eiffel Tower. Wow. And that was a mime. OK, this HAS to be intentional at this point. Also, more ninja fighting, through the window of a moving truck. Oh, and token girl just used her laser crossbow to make someone's head explode. You know, this movie really just kinda goes to prove in general that you can be totally stupid and without merit, yet still be completely awesome at the same time. Now here's the Cobra van transforming and firing missiles and lasers, and the power armor dudes taking shortcuts by just kinda jumping through buildings. I don't mean like, through windows. I mean jumping through freaking walls. Anyway, eventually the Cobra van is knocked off the road by a passing monorail, or possibly it's a shinkansen sorta deal. Either way, it's just.... going through a busy intersection in the middle of Paris here I guess, no guard rails or anything. So the van explodes but they're all fine, and continuing up to the top of the eiful tower I guess to uh... destroy Paris with grey goo nanites I guess? Oh no, they're destroying the eiffel tower from a nearby skyscraper. You uh... could probably have done that with a plain ol' rocket really. I mean, that'd take a main support down easy and it's a spindly sorta structure and all. Anyway, they actually don't stop this in time. I mean, eventually Duke, after bafflingly taking his helmet off, jumps into their UFO, and hits the Stop Eating Already Nanites! button, but they already ate a big enough chunk of the tower for the whole thing to collapse and all.
|
Next they go to interrogate a random dead Cobra dude by jamming spikes into his head that transfer his memories to their iPhone as pictures, but before they can work out where their base is from this, his supersoldier nanites go into self-destruct mode and make his head melt. Then the G.I. Joe dudes all get arrested. Because what the hell dudes, that was way too much property damage. Dennis Quaid comes to spring them from their Magneto style lucite jail cell. Apparently the French government says they're free to go as long as they never set foot in Paris again. Which is weird as heck, but so's this whole movie. They also all have to go home to their home countries. Did I mention that everyone was from a different country? I mean, it's kinda par for the course here. Anyway, more offensively generic ninja backstory, then the Joes take those mental images they DID get, notice you can see someone's shadow in one of them, and work out where they were because apparently these mental images have timestamps, so all they have to do is look at the length of his shadow, and they can locate the base through trigonometry! I'm dead serious. They say this. Now, I'm not going to bother pointing out the flaws in this scene's logic, but the important thing is they work out that they're based at the north pole. Of course, they kinda have Duke as a prisoner here, and just after they work this out he turns his tracking beacon on, so they kinda didn't need to do math. Also, technically it's an underwater fortress directly under the north pole.
It should also be noted that just after that whole sent back to your home countries bit, Dennis Quaid is all "well I didn't mean now or anything. Just, at some point in the future, if you wanna. So anyway, the Joes head to the underwater base via submarine disguised as a giant shark. Or maybe they were just checking it out with a robot probe disguised as a shark. Again, you have to RESPECT this movie. Anyone can be a little stupid and random, but when you take it to this kind of extreme it's a freaking art form. So... now the badguys are dragging Duke off to be given the brainwashy super soldier treatment... and.... no, that was totally a giant robo-shark before. It just burst through the polar icecap and spit out dudes in mini-jets that transform into snowmobiles, scaring the heck out of a random polar bear.
|
Now here's Mad Scientist explaining how MARS Industries (oh yeah, they're not actually CALLED Cobra yet, hence the subtitle "The Rise of Cobra") makes weapons in one division, and defensive technologies "like high-tech bunkers" with another, and then sells stuff to both sides! Uh... basically all military contractors with no governmental affiliation do that dude. They'll just plain sell the weapons to both sides too. It's not really shocking. He also gets his own random ultra-brief flashback but who cares? More stuff blows up, the Baroness is having an ethical crisis, because again, they used to date. Here's the president again real quick. Here's other random newbie, whose call sign is apparently Ripcord, which... really isn't cool is stealing some crazy experimental jet prototype which he knows the name of which is weird when you say "They actually built one?" about it. And.. OK, we have some real Quality Dialog being exchanged right here. I'm not going to get into it but this whole scene here is like "How to write generic action movie baduy speeches" to an amazing degree. And here's a great line out of context. "Deploy the sharks!" Inthis case, sharks referring to those little minisubs from forever ago, which we're launching from ports along the sides of, you know, our giant roboshark. So... now we're suddenly blatantly ripping off the death star assault from the end of Star Wars except, you know, with an underwater base under the north pole.
OK, so... The Doctor gets his face melted off because Duke shoots a laser at his flame thrower, but Mad Scientist rescues him to take him off to the safety of the Sequel Starting Escape Pod. Baroness is defecting apparently. Nanite warheads are launched at Moscow, newbie #2 with the superplane goes to intercept them but can't get the voice activated firing to work. "Wait, McCullen is Scottish! Maybe the plane responds to Celtic!" It does. Meanwhile though, the president is assassinated and replaced by Zoltar. Thank you so much movie for letting me type that sentence. By the way, have I mentioned how hilariously over the top Mad Scientist's Bad Guy Voice is? It's like as over the top as the Batman Voice from The Dark Knight, or a less subtle version of The Shadow's voice from that surprisingly good movie a few years ago. By the way, I heard a rumor that Sam Raimi is going to try and make a new Shadow movie. Weird thing to do.
|
Oh, and the ninjas are fighting some more, with evil white ninja snapping 2 katanas together at the hilt to make a way less effective Darth Maul-like weapon. Also, they're fighting in some huge reactor core with very slow lightning wandering around. It's kinda like those globe things? Where you touch'em and they get attracted to your fingers, but otherwise they just wiggle around aimlessly? Also, we're now going right ahead and ripping off the soundtrack to Star Wars. And "Duuuuke!" sounds a whole lot like "Luuuuke!" and... that was totally Han Solo's "Yehoo!" OK, again, this is CLEARLY INTENTIONAL. Oh, and I'm actually really impressed to see that we're actually acknowledging the fact that intercepting nanite filled warheads still splatters deadly nanites all over... but only with uh... one of the several warheads thusly destroyed hitting his plane and him more or less launching it into orbit and ejecting. Uh... what about the other one that you just shot down over moscow? Isn't that totally causing massive destruction? Heck, wouldn't that eventually eat away the entire world in a grey goo nightmare scenario? Which you actually acknowledged earlier with the whole kill switch thing for'em? I guess we're just going to let that slide, maybe we're just assuming they got hold of that already and they just wanted to minimize the initial damage.
Anyway though, on the escape pod, Mad Scientist injects The Doctor with some nanites to heal him/force him into servitude/make all the skin on his head turn silver so we can officially start calling him Destro (and recast him with someone with less dignity for the sequel), and officially start calling Mad Scientist Cobra Commander... and he starts using an even MORE over the top evil voice. And... you know, we can start calling Cobra Cobra in general. By the way, now that I have time to point it out, I should probably stress that when I said the Baroness defected before? What I meant to say was that she overcame mind control nanites through the power of love. Of course, in the process she lost her actually recognizable outfit and ultra-high-tech Transitions Lenses. Anyway, the bad guys getting their proper names doesn't really go anywhere because they are immediately captured and placed in crazy cylindrical jail cells with honest to goodness laser bars. So our real sequel hook, which we cut back to real quick before the credits, is how, and again, thank you for letting me type this, the president was assassinated and replaced by Zoltar.
So yeah. That was actually crazy enjoyable. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a terrible movie. There was not one word in the whole movie my brain was able to recognize as actual dialog, and even the ultra-generic one-liner-speak was surprisingly sparse. There was really never more than 10 seconds were things actually slowed down and stopped being all lasers and nanites and ninja fighting and explosions, barely anything approaching a logical plot thread. It was just non-stop totally non-sensical crazy action scenes with giant blue death beams firing all over the place and random transforming vehicles and stuff. That makes for a terrible movie. But the thing is, if you're going to go ahead and make a terrible movie? This is TOTALLY the way to do it. It's incredibly stupid, sure, but it's being really really entertaining about being incredibly stupid. Plus there's the whole self-parody angle when you crank it up this high. Speaking of which, yeah, this is enjoyable by the EXACT same logic the Crank movies are enjoyable. Hard to say which is more random though.
