f13.net

HD Trailer (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xKVqPzm134U)

That's going to be so very, very sad....

Looks pretty good to me, I'm not expecting a deep storyline or anything, but I likes me some action flicks.

Looks better than Dragon Ball.  But after Transformers it's hard to imagine that there is any respect for the source.

I will go.  And I will like it as much as Transformers.

Bear in mind, in my defense, I have a huge baroness fetish.  That woman got me through some difficult teenage years.

I'll watch it for Baroness Von Titties.

Shut your whore mouth, you hater. That looks like congealed Yo JOE awesomeness with a side of cheese whiz.

It's fucking GI JOE. It can't be any worse than Transformers.

Sure it can.. they can have The Emperor and all that Bio-crap from the late 80s and Destro without his titanium mask.   :grin:

The GI Joe I know and love are the 12" figures not this mamby-pamby-power-rangers-wanna-be shit. 

(http://rtyme.moonfruit.com/communities/2/004/005/606/912/images/4512650296.jpg)

Yeah but you're old.

Get off my lawn!

Only the best action figures come with flesh colored dildos.  12" indeed.

COBRA LALALALALALALALALAALALALALLALAALALALALAL!!!!111

I'll care about this movie when it's condensed into a Baroness cleavage montage.

All I ask is that it's an American organization. They could make up all their own characters, ditch Cobra, and make them fight the aliens from Indy 4, and I would eat it up as long as they were American instead of this weird multi-national thingie.

Why would there be? The source material was shit. I loved my GI Joe and Transformers as much as any red-blooded eighties kid, but come on. They were basically shit. Seriously, sit down and try to watch an episode. The best thing that whole Hasbro animation machine ever produced, the original animated Transformers movie, was a commercial flop where they killed all the established characters off in the first act and then had some newbies run through a vaguely Star Warsish adventure in an effort to sell a new line of toys.

Know what else was shit? Voltron. I tried to watch some with my brother late last year and we were just flabbergasted at how awful it was. Stuff is not as good as you remember.

He's not wrong.

Though it's still awesome as viewed through the lenses of your childhood nostalgia.

Honestly I think Transformers still holds up, as does GI Joe. I watched some episodes of Transformers fairly recently. The animation is pretty good (until you get to some of the episodes after the movie), the voice work is good, the plots are decent.

Voltron yeah, total crap. It actually has kind of an interesting arc and characters but it's ultra-repetitive with terrible animation and dialogue.

"I can't deal with that now"

 :awesome_for_real:

We non-Americans love American movies with American cultural imperialism stamped all over them. "Independence Day" was a laugh riot.

Well, while this is a good point, GI Joe was created to sell to American children and said right on the package "A Real American Hero!" It'd be like taking some book or toy or whatever from wherever you are that is basically wrapped up in your country and changing it just to make more money off of it.

All that said, the multinational stuff doesn't bother me. I'll see this for Snake Eyes, Scarlet, the Baroness, and Destro (if he's done right.)

Destro is Scottish.

So fuck you all.

(That said, ID4 with it's stirring 'Americans have figured out Morse Code and have a plan, thank Christ, because we British have been wanking into paper cups the entire film !!'  Fuck that.)

Destro doesn't have his mask on in the trailers at all. Apparently, he spends a bit of time not in the mask during the movie (he's played by Eccleston).

I'm not expecting great cinema here. I just want it to be better than that excreble Transformers movie which DID shit all over the source. Yes, the source of both movies is campy, childish shit meant to shill toys to kids. That doesn't mean you can't respect it.

In fairness I think the studios will have an easier time staying true to the source simply because if you take an average GI Joe episode and remade it with a high budget you would have a fun, entertaining action film with famous faces. A Classic summer blockbuster. Transformers failed for me because they gave the focus over to whoever the fuck played the human actors rather than CGI and voice actors. Joe won't have that problem and I don't see any need to alter the formula.

Of course maybe the studio will feel what they really need more of it romance thrillers where Lady Jane gets kidnapped and Flint spends the movie racing from place to place picking up telephone clues as to her whereabouts. The USA#1 thing doesn't bother me just because that's what GI Joe was though like Ironwood said, fuck ID4.

Yeah but I figure that's Destro "undercover."  You can't really say, "What, me part of a global terrorist organization determined to rule the world? No, not me." convincingly if you're wearing a big shiny chrome dome.

 I never understood the man's need to wear the mask all the time, anyway, it's got to get hot under there.  :grin:  My wife's theory is that he'll have some sort of accident in which his face gets all mangled and that's where he'll start wearing it.

I still don't get how Transformers shit all over the source.  They're robots... that transform.  If the pisser is that they don't look like the 80's toys, you'd best get to bitching that Shipwreck won't be in 1950s sailor blues and Scarlett isn't wearing a bulletproof leotard in colors so bright they scream "aim here!"

It was more than just the Transformers not looking like their toys - they looked like total shit and weren't the stars of the movie at all. The action was also terribly filmed and unwatchable.

Destro's mask will apparently be some sort of family heirloom. Best guess is some of that technology eating bio shit that takes out the Eiffel Tower affects him and he's forced to put the mask on.

That was cobra commanders, not Destro's story.

Actually I meant Indy 4, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull aliens. Just in case I was misconstrued. ^^ BAH too many ID4's now! Come to think of it, a GI Joe movie with an Independence Day kind of vibe would totally rock.

Dollies aside, for some reason this film looks good to me.  As usual, I'll wait until it comes out for DvD, but I do want to see it.  Someone tell me how good it is!

I did find a certain charm in Quaid's performance as Duke.

That's General Hawk, actually.  Duke is the guy to the left at 0:22
Yeah I knew that wasn't Destro's original backstory, but wasn't sure what it was.  It seemed a reasonable supposition on the wife's part, though.

Oh, I completely understand that the US would never (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kath_And_Kim_U.S_Version) take an existing IP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_(1996_film)) from another country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Office_(U.S._TV_series)), Americanise it up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars_(U.S._TV_series)) and then sell it (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298130/) into the world market.

I fully expect this to have some sort of Team America:  World Police vibe very subtly underlying everything.  Nobody can make this kind of movie anymore (i.e., reaching back to a treasured memory, like the Brady Bunch or something) without descent into parody.

You missed Iron Chef.

Seriously, I was down with the worries over "faith to source material" when it came to... say... Lord of the Rings. But GI fucking Joe? Comic Book Guy can get over himself.

This.

Although I admit to a certain amount of morbid disappointment over this:

Sounds like an apt description of World War 2.  :drill:

You know, now you guys mention it, there was an absolute fuckton of face mutilation and masking up in GI Joe.

Hmmm.

I'm up to 7.  Though I'm including Zartans mob.

(http://image.milehighcomics.com/istore/images/fullsize/35544179902.55.GIF)

I don't know if I'm more worried at that, or that Shipwreck is played by The Rock. I think The Rock may be decent for it, but something about him doesn't seem like what I would have imagined for Shipwreck. There's something about certain cast members that makes me curious as to how they will do, such as having Marlon Wayons in this movie as Ripcord (http://media.filmschoolrejects.com/images/mwayans01.jpg). Despite the fact that he doesn't resemble Ripcord at all, I've seen White Chicks, and I've seen Dungeons and Dragons (not even Jeremy Irons could save that crap), they weren't good and he certainly didn't help any.

Although their picks for Snake Eyes and Stormshadow I think are great, and I have to agree with someone who posted earlier about Dennis Quaid being a pretty damn good pick.

Edit: Add /url

Dennis Quaid is perfect IMHO, Ray Park is great for Snake Eyes, but that Stormshadow guy looks like some emo teenager about to cry over his darkdark poetry. I'm sure he can fight, but WTF goth hair??

I would really love it if at some point someone is asking about GI Joe and Duke says "Yeah we started as an American unit but then..." and whatever excuse after that. It would tie in the old Patriotic stuff and pave the way for their weird politically correct shit.

I even remember the song!  GI Joe, GI Joe, Fighting something something something foe, something, something, La La La, La La!  I never watched it, though, just sang along.

There is a very strong case to be made that in fact he made it worse.

Crashing through the night
Comes a fear full cry
Cobra! Cobra! Cobra! Cobra!
Armies of the night
Evil taking flight
Cobra! Cobra! Cobra! Cobra!
No where to run
No where to hide
Panic spreading far and wide
Who can turn the tide?

GI Joe- A real American hero
Yo Joe!
GI Joe is there

GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe is there
Fighting for freedom
Wherever there's trouble
over land and sea and air
GI Joe is there

Can the world oppose
Deadliest of foes?
Cobra! Cobra! Cobra! Cobra!
Joes will risk it all
To end the evil call of
Cobra! Cobra! Cobra! Cobra!
They never give up
They never say die
Walking tall with banners high
They sound the battle cry-
Yo Joe! Yo Joe!

GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe will dare
GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe is there

Fighting for freedom
Wherever there's trouble
over land and sea and air
GI Joe is there

GI Joe is the codename for American's daring, highly trained
special mission force.
It's purpose, to defend human freedom against Cobra-
a ruthless, terrorist organization determined to rule the world.

GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe will dare
GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe is there
Fighting for freedom
Wherever there's trouble
over land and sea and air
GI Joe is there
Cobra! Retreat! Retreat!

GI Joe- A real American hero
GI Joe is there
GI Joe

I was pretty close.

Or if you want to hear the catchy tune to go with it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN034sBeF4c

omg bastards blowing up the statue!!!

And people rightly bitch about it alot. In this case it's even worse though. It'd be taking, say, James Bond, and making him an American CIA agent named Jim Bond. Part of his identity is that he is British. Same thing here.


This. Marlon Wayan's casting dropped my interest in this movie by about 50%. I went from "looks cheesy but fun" to "shit, it's probably gonna be self parodying crap that I won't be able to sit through."

I was talking about Jeremy Irons!

Give him a chance. This isn't a stupid comedy directed or financed by one of his brothers. This isn't him in a comic relief role (maybe)? Even if he plays it generic but cool that'll be more than enough for me.

It's been done. They called him Jimmy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_Royale_(Climax!)) Which I think was your point.

Also: there is no way in the world G.I. Joe and James Bond are even vaguely equivalent cultural icons. One is for boys who want bang bang, good guy triumphs over bad guy, the day is saved and the other is for men who want bang bang, good guy triumphs over bad guy, the day is saved and then some implied shagging.

But anyway: no way is G.I. Joe debased by making it a more international force. Provided they avoid including the slightly un-PC Vietnamese character called Tunnel Rat. 

But then the uneasy alliance GI Joe has with the Oktober Guard would be meaningless.

I never said they were culturally equivalent. James Bond was just the first example I could think of that is strongly tied to its country of origin and would be greatly damaged by changing that. Debased is a strong word in this case. But yes, it's a change that is only being made to appeal to a different audience than the core audience. And it is slightly offensive because it smells P.C. to me and in this case G.I. Joe is strongly tied to America. Hell, the very name comes from a generic term for an American soldier and is subtitled "A Real American Hero" in the toys, comics, and cartoons.

Oh, and Jimmy Bond? Whoever did that needs to be strangled with their own entrails.

Oh please. James Bond was barely James Bond at that point. The Climax! TV adaptation happened exactly one year after the very first book. They didn't do this after 50 years of IP conditioning. They did it before there was barely any awareness at all, probably to introduce him to a wider audience.

Not so sure on that simply because part of Bond's identity seemed to really play on some dapper, witty and arrogant British idea that I don't think translates so well to an American character. A secret special forces unit that fights global terrorism? Doesn't seem ridiculous to make them multinational and makes it 'simpler' to have them fighting Cobra wherever they want to set the battles otherwise you've got Team America style American soldiers fighting terrorists in Paris. It really isn't a particularly important point to me though, leave them American make them multinational it's still going to be a big action blockbuster. Explosions don't recognise cultural differences :drill:

FFS.

A popcorn movie.  That's all it is.

Way to over-analyse a G.I. Joe movie, you bunch of cock tacos.

When I first saw the trailer on TV, I had no clue what it was and thought to myself "fuck, but that looks awesome".  And then I recognized a character that could only be Snake Eyes and I said to myself "fuck, but that IS COMPLETELY AWESOME".

And Transformers not staying close to the source material?  Huh?  That series re-invents itself completely with every generation.  It's almost like Zelda that way.  If you want to argue that the film's focus was off, fine.  That movie had big, nasty robots, lots of action and Megan Fox being even hotter than Megan Fox.  Also, Megan Fox shares all but two letters of her name with Megatron, who is also awesome.

In short, everyone needs to quit with the stupid.

News: Transformers wasn't bad.

This, however, has that one guy in it. Yeah, that guy. No.

Dinobots.

You just made Grimlock cry.

I know absolutely nothing about GI Joe stories or characters.  The trailer just made it look like a good fun film.  Having said that, a lot of time I find that after seeing a film, all the good bits were in the trailer anyway.  I always get annoyed when that happens.

Guns, boobs, explosions, costumes, vehicles and Americana.

Looks on target to me.

Transformers was monkey shit thrown on a wall and pissed on. It was MICHAELBAYSPLOSIONS! WITH ROBOTS!!!!

Transformers was a cool movie.  You're just being a cunt.

While the latter is almost certainly true 99% of the time, the former is 100% false.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155700/  :grin:

Ohh holy shit, the guy directing this has quite a stellar line up including the Mummy movies (including the Scorpion King flicks) and *drumroll* VAN HELSING.  Yah, this will suck independently of what source it was spawned from.

That could very well be. Sommers doesn't have a good track record. But I have hope.

The actor I was making fun of earlier btw is Channing Tatum. Bad director or not, I wouldn't watch this because of that actor.. If he can be called that. I'm rarely that shitty about something as a rule, but he just pisses me off. Can't help it. I'm also like this about Paul Walker though. There are porn stars who deliver lines better than him.

This is one of those arguments where I see where H is coming from, but I have to disagree.  Transformers had Optimus putting a blade through someones nut.  That worked for me.

And Megan really, really, really needed a wash in that film.  She was horribly greasy the ENTIRE movie and it wasn't nice. 

But, as mentioned, GI will be a bit of fun.  What's not to like ?

We'll see, eh ?

"Transformers" was great whenever the Transformers were on screen and they weren't trying to be funny or talking to the annoying humans. There wasn't much of that in the film.

Broadly speaking, you've got three options when you do this:

1) Make it shitty in a way that perfectly captures the shittiness of the source material. This will not even please the nostalgia fans, because most of us rework Saturday Morning as an experience into something better than the source material at the heart of it. We don't want to have to watch, a la Clockwork Orange, the shittiness perfectly intact only with contemporary CGI. It's like seeing your parents naked.

2) Make it postmodernly self-knowledgeable about the nostalgic pastiche that we're seeing. See "Brady Bunch". Works, but it's ultimately not that satisfying. You feel like someone is laughing *at you* rather than *with you*.

3) Make it genuinely good while sticking in a lot of grace-note nods to the original material. Maybe you take the original premise seriously (see remake of "Battlestar Galactica") or you just translate 70s-80s pop culture cheese into 2000s pop culture cheese in some imaginative way.

OR

You can just make a sucky film that has no particular philosophy to its suck. See tons and tons of films that dug some old license out of the cultural grave.

I don't understand the need for either the G.I. Joe or Transformer movies.  I grew up with the cartoons like a lot of other people here, but I understand that they were little more than half-hour commercials for the toys.  I'm not sure why seeing them turned into live action movies is supposed to appeal to me.

Nostalgia.  Just like the reissues of the 80's toys.  What, you think the preteen boys are buying those?

I'm all for nostalgia in many cases, but some things are ok to outgrow.

While all the ranting here about Transformers has been done by adults, a lot of kids saw Transformers too. And enjoyed the heck out of it.

Of course, these same kids also enjoyed SW:Ep1 :awesome_for_real:

Cartoon Network broke the Saturday Morning paradigm and then the DVR finishing-moved it. Timeshifted Transformers, Clone Wars, etc, your audience is not based on their prime viewing opportunities. Many points of consumer engagement blah blah blah...

That trailer did indeed look awesome. So did this one! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6hOlI9cg4o)

Oh, knock it off.

Apparently. Independence Day made about 2/3 of it's money outside the United States, a greater proportion of overseas revenue than... say... Dark Knight or any Star Wars. You guys can quit paying money for our cultural imperialism anytime you want, you know?

We liked seeing the symbol of the US cultural oppression destroyed, so saw it multiple times.  :grin:

(http://l.yimg.com/img.movies.yahoo.com/ymv/us/img/hv/photo/movie_pix/twentieth_century_fox/independence_day/id4white.jpg)

You know what, you're all going to see it. You're going to turn your brains off, step into the theater, and enjoy yourselves.

That's my goal. A pleasant experience. I'm not expecting this movie to change the world. I'm expecting some entertainment. There are enough quality people involved that I don't expect a clusterfuck.

But your perceptions will be colored if you were a huge fan of the original IP.

You don't understand how much I dislike Channing Tatum. I'd rather watch a marathon of Jeff Fahey films.

I didn't watch Transformers and I'm not watching this either.  The trailer looked like bland shit, the Director sucks, and Christopher Eccleston is the only actor in it worth watching.  Also it looks like they kidnapped the costume designer from the X-men movies.  If I have to see a movie with Channing Tatum in it this coming summer, it'll be Public Enemies.

Oh just shut the fuck up and eat your McNuggets already.

I kid.

Also.  Am I seeing that Eccleston quit being Doctor Who to pursue serious roles like this movie?  Huh.

And finally.  I wish they would stop fagging up my childhood with live action remakes.  Sometimes the medium is part of the success.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v464/barney1969/gunghoandshipwreck.jpg)

touche

Looking back it amazes me how little detail was in the animation itself, but they'd always draw that Marine tatoo in excruciating detail.

I used to watch it a ton, but oddly, I don't remember a damn thing about it.

Also, fuck childhood. What I do specifically remember is playing with a few friends, like we tended to do, fighting with our action figures and shit -- and me having the sudden realization to stand up and say "Fuck this", walking away, and looking for a girl to hang out with. I was 10. A good age for childhood to die.

I always wondered why they ran away from large rolling boulders/objects by running directly in front of them instead of going right or left.

It was probably just a way to cut down on the amount of animation required, but it used to drive me (more) nuts as a kid.

Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atXIKI2XHj4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atXIKI2XHj4)

lol.  "respect the source." 

(http://www.toybender.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/cobracommanderprofile.jpg)

Cobra Commander or Voldo? You decide!

(On the topic of Voldo, I hadn't seen this Dance Voldo Dance (http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=1234) clip before. Clever, and then it goes exactly where you think it would at about 2:20.)

"Its our new accelerator suit"

"What does it accelerate?"

"You."


That shit was awesome on the big screen.
And it has fucking ninjas!

G.I. joe as master chief style cyber super-soldiers is beyond retarded.  It's like they saw how much money iron man made and just decided real people aren't interesting.  It could have been a great movie if hollywood wasn't so deathly afraid of showing kids guns.  How much do you want to bet that the joes don't even get anything resembling guns in this movie?  Oh sure in the cartoon all the guns shot lasers but they still looked like guns, kids weren't fooled. 

I'm not saying this should be rambo but there was a lot of potential for john woo style coolness with real actors but instead all the cool stuff we'll see if going to be people in cgi battlesuits.  They could have just named this movie "the centurians" and been more faithful to that cartoon instead of G.I. Joe

G.I. Joe was hysterically ridiculous and as source material deserves no particular respect. Tell me it was good, tell me it was worthless shit, but don't tell me it "wasn't faithful enough" to it's dumbass badly-animated toy commerical roots.

I don't give a good god damn about the source material but god dammit there's much better things they could have done with this than HALO:the movie.

Hauntingly, intensely true.

Whatever man, if it doesn't have Shipwreck in his little sailor hat, it ain't G.I. Joe. It would be like He-Man without Man-at-Arms.

 :uhrr:
 :awesome_for_real:

And are you setting yourself up as the nostalgia police? I go to work, I pay my bills, I interact with people on a (semi  :grin:) adult level. If I wanna get nostalgic about something from my childhood that I was fond of, I feel like it's my own damn business.

The only way I'd see this movie were if it were done as a Robot Chicken-esque, stop motion animation film using real action figures.   Bonus points for using the 12" figures from the 1960's.  

Now I'm having flashbacks of that Michael Richards skit from Fridays!

I gotcha beat. At 2 years old I was hooked on coke and had to fight for my fix in the illegal child fighting pits of Mexico.  I never even had the luxury of childhood toys. I had a rough childhood, eating gruel and sleeping with diseased hookers until I fought my way out of the seedy streets and crawled over the desert sands to freedom.
It may have made me a hard and bitter man, but I've still got a heart of gold.

Fine, laugh now but when you guys get a shitty watered-down iron man movie with marlon wayans....don't say I didn't warn you.

By all means, spend your hard earned money on the Hollywood blockbuster movie that's kinda loosely based on the half-hour long toy commercial we used to enjoy as kids, from the director of the Mummy franchise and Van Helsing.  It's just like the cartoon you knew and loved, except with exo-suits and some relationship drama between Duke and the Baroness.

Like I posted in the Transformers 2 thread this is why I have no plans to see this movie. GI Joe wasn't art, but this is totally shitting all over the stuff that made it interesting. (What little there was to be blunt.) Hell, if they wanted to make a decent movie they should have used the Marvel comics as a base. It took the ridiculous GI Joe and made it kind of believable and cool. (for awhile, it eventually went off the rails.)

This is beautiful.

One word: Ninjas.


 :why_so_serious:

I used to think this was going to be good.

Then I saw the latest trailer and Transformers 2.

This is going to suck all kinds of SHIT.

I just saw the new trailer on tv and the baroness doesn't have an accent.


 :mob:

There will be fights in the beginning, then one of the G.I.s will really talk with Cobra Commander and realize he had a traumatic childhood.  The G.I.s will realize that THEIR willingness to use violence makes them really no different than the people who they are fighting.  In the end, both sides will finally obtain the most powerful weapon of all:  love. 

I'm okay with that if said love involves Sienna Miller in interesting positions.

Do a google search, she has been in pretty much every position already.

You say that like it ever gets old.  :awesome_for_real:

So, if I didn't know before what GI Joe is, I can ignore this movie?

When I first heard GI Joe was going to be a movie, I got happy - then I recalled the horror that unfolded on the screen during the Transformers movie and then got sad. I mean really...

 vs
Feels like when I was a kid seeing the difference between the 1/2 gallon of vanilla ice cream in the freezer and walking into a Baskin Robbins.

I had not planned on seeing this unless there are Porkchop Sandwiches.

Valid gripe, except the first year or so there were only 11 figures out there.  Look at it that way.

Not that the movie won't be horrible on the level all 80s toy movies have been.

This movie is looking more and more like it will give Stealth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382992/) a run for its money as the worst big budget action movie of the decade.

All I remember from the show was that people could shoot the gun from your hand but couldn't actually hit anyone.  Also, both sides lost a lot of planes but no soldiers.  Budget overruns for the Joe's must have put us in a deficit.

This movie better do at least as well as Transformers 2, otherwise I swear, I shall be no end of confused!

Did you seriously expect the movie to include four guys based on sports, a guy dressed like a killer bee, two samurai, a pink shirtless Jason reject, four ninjas, a parrot, a jaguar, a panther and DEEP FUCKING SIX? (note, I could actually keep going as there are some schizophrenics and other interesting characters as well)

Did you expect that magical movie to be good?

The only characters worth taking seriously are in the bottom right of that picture, and most of them are...well... not that far from the what you have in picture two.

I'm not saying the movie will be good, but the movie some G.I. Joe fans had in their head was never going to be good.  Especially not with two-thirds of those rejects.  At least Resolute paired it down to a good 20-something Joes.

I'm thinking: remake the Bugs Bunny Saturday morning opener but using every G.I. Joe character.  Eighty minutes of awesome.

Overture, curtain, lights!

I always thought a GI Joe movie would be more like Mortal Kombat, just embracing the cheese and going for it, instead of trying to get people to take them seriously and "reimagine" and whatever. And dark. Can't forget dark.

I would have loved to see massive battles on both sides, ya know armies fighting which is sort of what gi joe is supposed to be.  All we're gonna get is small squad combat in super suits which is...meh. 

Personally it should end with the joes having decimated an entire city(with no casualties of course) and then standing atop the rubble of what used to be L.A  then, after marlon wayans comes in and says "Sir, we've defeated cobra and gotten all the people to safety, we won."  they will pan out and show the near complete destruction and have hawk shout out "Yo Joe!"

The key difference being that the cheesy version would get wholly overlooked by the mainstream, while the douched up sellout version will be a summer blockbuster.  Count on it.  We all seem to have trouble understanding that when films like this are created, there is only ever one motivating factor.  Money.  They care about the source material only to the extent that it is a recognizable IP.  

We also continually fail to realize that IPs like GI Joe and Transformers are constantly being reinvented.  They both exist or existed in some other form than the 80s TV show.  They don't have any specific canon they must adhere to, because they always fucking change.  You're simply setting the wrong expectations.

The chicks better still be hot though, that's a given.

Edit:  added quote.

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I totally expected it to go into cult status. I didn't think they'd get so much money to make it, either.

What weirds me out about Transformers is that Optimus was a semi in the movie. He was NEVER a semi except that one time. So...they used the 80's version, but didn't? Huh? Same with GI Joe. They're using the 80's version, but not? Or something? Reimagining some parts and going "THIS IS NOT THE 80'S GI JOE!" But they're still using some of it and going "THIS IS TOTALLY THE 80'S GI JOE!"

Whatever. I'll still see it.

The existence of any non-eighties version of Optimus that turned into something besides a semi truck was irrelevant. People who know/care about some non-eighties version of Optimus that turned into something besides a semi truck are themselves irrelevant. They made him a truck because he's a truck in the mind of the general public, but made him a different model of truck because they thought it looked better.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Do they even still make the old mac trucks for them to have propped up, anyway?  All I ever see around here are the engine-forward types and none of the old "ride the engine" semis.

G.I joe is not going to bea blockbuster. Transformers2 rode on the success of the first and was still somewhat decent in the action dept. gi joe has much, much less going for it and the IP is even less important than in the case of transformers.

Of course! Hollywood needs to learn to respect the source material or else people won't take it seriously!  :why_so_serious:

(http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc107/bastardlybutta/bastardly-photos/album125/rachel-nichols-gi-joe-scarlett-07.jpg)

:drill:

The ads for this movie are now running with a lame quite like "lots of fun" from Knowles at AintItCool, which means it must be even worse than we imagined.

I probably shouldn't have used the the term blockbuster.  I think it has the potential to be a success, though.  I think there are a lot of guys my age who want to see a hot Baroness duking it out with a naughty Scarlett.  Not to mention a Snake Eyes vs. Stormshadow brawl, the though of which makes the 11 year-old in me tingle with anticipation.

I could see this being one of those movies that makes like $150m domestic and $300m worldwide and is still regarded as a disappointment for bringing in $100m profit instead of $400m. A semi-flop in the mold of both Hulk movies.

I was the person who said "respect the source" on the first page.  I don't see what the problem is.  Iron Man, LotR, 300 and Spiderman did it and made good money.  I was specifically talking about movies I want to see.  Hollywood is free to film abortions of childhood memories and make a bundle doing it, but these are not movies I will watch.  Nobody has taken Hollywood seriously in a very long time regardless of G.I. Joe.

Because pairing down the team and giving leather costumes to the X-men really damaged that film.

First, disclaimer: I LOVE REIMAGININGS AND AM NEVER IN GEEK RAGE WHEN A DIRECTOR OR WRITER CHANGES SHIT. Please to not lump me in with the shitfuck fuckfucktardfuckers who fucking freak out when fucking shit gets changed because I fucking hate adherence for the sake of fucking nostalgia. Direct translations bore me to tears. Pisses me right the fuck off.

That said, I honestly figured the general public saw him as a firetruck.

Respect the source material when it's good. Change it when you can do better. Changing for the sake of changing stuff (i.e. directorial masturbation like the elves at Helm's Deep) is just as bad as keeping crappy stuff in.

Hollywood has never been about anything but money.  Never.  Oh sure, there are those out there with vision and whatnot, but you generally need money to get there and make profit to stay there.

That said, the source material, even at its most serious is like this:
or this:
And the movie is like this:

The difference there is almost immaterial.  And people bitch about the damn accelerator suits, but the cartoon had these wonderful gems.

So... frankly who cares what they did to it?

What AZ said.  Also, I forgot how awesome the trubble bubble is.  You have sparked some serious nostalgia in me, dude.

I haz BATTLE BALLZ!

From what I've heard, the accelerator suits are in that one long action sequence that you've seen everywhere and that's it. It seems strange to use something so minor as such a heavy point of emphasis, but meh. I think the movie will be fine as a braindead action movie that has some similarities to the characters they are based on. As long as it isn't Bayformers or Van Helsing bad, I'm ok with it.

Speaking of Van Helsing, maybe I missed it in all the nerdrage, but has it been mentioned that this movie is being directed and produced by the guy who wrote and directed Van Helsing?

Not very encouraging.

Yeah but he also did The Mummy and Deep Rising which were both fun if not exactly the pinnacle of cinematic endeavour.

Yes, I'm well aware that this is directed by Van Helsing and The Mummy director. Which is why I'm hoping it doesn't suck like Van Helsing. I want this movie to not be shitty.

Huh? When was Optimus Prime ever a firetruck? Are you from some similar but not quite right alternate dimension? Like maybe Carter got re-elected in your universe and it changed the timeline in subtle ways?

Um, since now? (http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Optimus_Prime_(Animated))

(http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/transformers/images/thumb/9/98/OptimusPrimeAnimated.JPG/300px-OptimusPrimeAnimated.JPG)

 :ye_gods: Vector Sigma! What have they done to you?!

He's still a general purpose truck.  He just has one firetruck attachment.
(http://tformers.net/i/a/animated/animtated-prime-pr-1.jpg)

The only time he's actually been a firetruck was in the 2001 Transformers cartoon:
(http://www.dvandom.com/tv00/5fcdraw.GIF)

Otherwise, he's a truck.  The truck type changes slightly, but whatever.

Unless you happen to like Van Helsing.

Optimus Prime is a jew.

A Jew...that can omg turn into a firetruck?!!! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_mYPzNQddM)

So was Thomas the Tank Engine tho.

He used to be called Tovarich Von Tankenstein.

/sayle.

That is truly an abomination.

Still better than Bayformers though.

Dude, that was totally fucking awesome.  Wah wah the artstyle is weird.  It was funny, made cracks at classic Transformer stuff, and was amusing.

In general the Transformers Animated show was pretty rad.  Season 2 was a bit ass but S1 and S3 were mighty damned good.

It had Weird Al.  As Wreck Gar.  Who was a garbage truck.  Fred Willard as Swindle.  Lance Henriksen as a new villain whose name I forget.  Tripolar Blitzwing.

Optimus Prime isn't Optimus Prime without Peter Cullen doing the voice.

Also, too jokey.

 :roll:
Indeed. They should have started the film with 30 min of Emo Optimus.

Topic! Has anyone seen this yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucc7xDLXXPU

Wow, so first they have someone say "She's smarts!" Then they show her reading a book. Holy fuck. I was hoping for cheesy goodness, not rancid goat milk.

 :ye_gods: make it stop.....please....

I didn't realize Scarlett was a vulcan.

She runs like a girl.

That wasn't that bad. The worst part about that video was Scarlett talking.

Jeebus that was really bad. Think I'll wait for this to hit the TV or torrent cesspool because spending any money on this just seems to encourage bad things.

Everything about that scene was horrid, how can you watch that and not see some shitty sci-fi channel movie?

This makes DnD the movie look good.

This movie is actually getting alot of decent reviews from what I've seen so far.  Nothing as scathing as Transformers 2 got. 

Although I don't know what most of you expect.  This isn't supposed to be Citizen Kane or anything.  It's a fucking GI Joe movie.

I was expecting something along the lines of Dragonball Z, but it sounds like it's not even that good.

It really (http://scifiwire.com/2009/07/review-gi-joe-the-rise-of.php) doesn't (http://chud.com/articles/articles/20306/1/REVIEW-GI-JOE---THE-RISE-OF-COBRA/Page1.html) seem (http://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=27789) that bad (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41896).  People are actually enjoying it.  I think the completely lowered expectations may in fact, be working out for them.

Wow, that was a horrible, horrible scene.  I find myself protecting my brain by rationalizing that she was fucking with him, knowing he'd have no counter for that argument, instead of just saying, "Go away, I'm boinking Snake Eyes."

One of those links is to Aint it Cool.  You can go there and find a positively glowing review of Twilight.  Maybe you can find a review somewhere that doesn't contain a variation of the phrase "well on every level this movie is complete shit, but I'm going to excuse all that because it's fun", followed by a some crap about this is exactly the kind of stuff we imagined when we played with our toys as a kid.

Yeah, but I liked the DnD movie. It was total campy shit, but I liked it, even the Wayans bit. Sometimes, I can enjoy something even when I know it could be written, acted and directed about 100 times better.

It's a summer blockbuster based on an eighties toy-commercial cartoon. If you ever even remotely expected anything besides two hours of explosions and stupidity trying to win you over by being stupid fun, well, that's your brain damage.

I'm pretty sure I posted this exact same thing in the Transformers 2 thread.

I don't think anyone expected the movie to be anything more than that.  Doesn't mean you need to applaud filmmakers for having abysmally low expectations for their movie and then hitting those expectations.  If your kid aims to get a D on his math test and succeeds, he's still a fucking idiot.

I'm treating it the same way I treated my nephew's school group's rendition of Romeo & Juliet.  It's not going to be good, but I can get some laughs out of it.  And I spent $15 on that.

Again, there was no work of art hiding behind this property at all.

Ya but his kid isn't raking in millions of dollars in the process.  There aren't many *Great Movies* that make near as much money as these action blockbusters.  You know why?  People go to the movies most of the time just to be entertained.  They don't want to go to a movie that makes them sit there and have to think.

I admit I'm one of those people.  When I go to a movie I just want to be entertained, to laugh, to ooh and aah at explosions, and see good special effects.  When I feel like thinking and getting into a story, 90% of the time I just read books.

Ok, allow me to rephrase:

It's a summer blockbuster based on an eighties toy-commercial cartoon. If you ever even remotely think that more than 0.00001% of the world WANTS anything from it besides two hours of explosions and stupidity trying to win you over by being stupid fun, well, that's your brain damage.

You can make an entertaining movie that doesn't require you to think, but that also doesn't have a poorly written script and shit acting.  I'm not sure why some people get it into their heads that the two are mutually exclusive, but such thinking is why crap like Transformers rakes in money.

That was not stupid fun. Mortal Kombat and Top Gun were stupid fun. That clip was pure stupid. No amount of explosions could cut the taste of fail in that clip.

I dunno, if Ripcord's head (that is who that is isn't it?) exploded it'd be pretty fun.

Top Gun? You've clearly somehow managed to block those memories if you think Top Gun wasn't filled with horrifically stupid scenes like above clip.

Well, if you put it that way, you must be right.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah but it also had Val Kilmer and fighter jets.  This is going to have really terrible exosuit scenes, Dennis Quaid and less sex.  Fail.

Yes, because Val Kilmer has such a huge career right now!    :why_so_serious:

Don't you diss Madmartigan.

When Kilmer is on, he's on fire. Doc Holliday in "Tombstone" steals the entire film from some other veteran hams. Gay Perry in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" was hilarious. He just also has a number of very ordinary roles under his belt too and has the rep of being hard to work with. Some of his cameos in more recent years have also been excellent (I'm thinking of "The Missing").

I get the  :why_so_serious:, but I felt it important to pound the keyboard in kilmerrage in case someone missed it.  :grin:

Look, I'm pretty sure that unlike Transformers, even Michael Bay couldn't fuck up a G.I. Joe movie. In fact, he could probably do it better. The source material in this case is pretty thin on plot and characters. For fuck's sake, the COMIC BOOK had more characterization than the TV show. Here, I'll write you a G.I. Joe plot.

1) Cobra builds some insanely improbable sci-fi destructo gadget like the weather dominator or the Vag Sealer or something equally stupid.
2) Cobra Commander makes some horribly douche moustache-twirling speech
3) Cobra flunkies get shot trying to do their jobs badly
4) Joes detect the use of the Vag Sealer with satellites
5) Joes send Snake-Eyes by himself to slaughter a division's worth of Cobra troops
6) Joes mount up on some horribly improbable vehicle device, like the Spinning Cube Burrower
7) Everyone screams YO JOE and CO-BRA! at each other while firing ineffectually in the air
8) Despite taking no casualties, Cobra fucks right off with a vow to get you next time my pretties
9) Duke shows up to tell kids not to insert weirdly shaped objects into their peehole because Knowing is Half the Battle.

Done. Film it, screen it, rake it in.

Or, they could just film a live-action version of Resolute, which has the same type of story, only with the ass-kicking turned up and blood and death.

BRILLIANT!!!

Fuck no.

300 didn't respect the source?

It was missing something to the tune of several thousand (more) Athenians, several thousand Helots, and a massive fucking sea battle where and Anthenian navy fixed rams into the Persian fleet and then plowed them onto fucking cliffs.

But that might just be the retarded fucker who wrote the graphic novel as an allegory to the U.S.

The movie was respectful to the source material, which was the graphic novel, not the history.

The fact that there is a more recent source doesn't give the more recent source authority, or make derivative works less of a steaming shitpile.

All I'm saying is that the movie wasn't trying to be respectful to the history, or historically accurate. Don't blame the movie for the failings of its source, i.e. the graphic novel.

History Fanboi?  :-o 

That stupid Branaugh movie totally misrepresented the Battle of Agincourt! 

Don't even get me started on U-571

Edit:  Shit, what did I type ??

Some of you people are just strange.  What exactly is happening in your minds that makes you think a fucking Hollywood film needs to be historically accurate in any sense of the word?  I mean, it's fine to rail on a film for all manner of issues, but because it "doesn't respect the source" just means you are possibly the world's hugest dork.  This goes quadruply so when the "source" is just a bunch of made up shit to begin with.

While I tend to agree on stuff like 300, there is a line that shouldn't be crossed.

If someone genuinely made 'Springtime for Hitler' and presented it as a serious piece, you'd be a bit annoyed.  By the same token, films that trivialise actual events for cheap thrills should be fucked in the ass for all their worth.  Pearl Harbour Sucked.  And I miss you.

And then there are other films, not to be mentioned, where the cast of the actual historical events are changed and totally and utterly cheapen the very real sacrifice and effort of those who were originally involved and died for.

Yes, I'm talking about Chorlton and The Wheelies The Movie.

Fucking Shameful.

Come on now, Braveheart was awesome.

I see what you're saying and generally agree.  But I guess I'm even okay with the trivialization of Pearl Harbor.  That's likely because I recall thinking that Kate Beckinsdale was so outrageously hot that the rest of the film hardly registered.

I can't think of a movie where I saw Kate Beckinsale and didn't wish she was single.

I realize the graphic novel was a shitpile, hence the first post.  But it doesn't excuse the next shitpile any more than Transformers 1 excuses Transformers 2.  But I guess that's different... somehow.  Evidently Sunday cartoons designed to schill toys to children deserve more respect than the Battle of Thermopylae and Salamis, right tazelbain?

Right, thought so.

While on this note, we need a name for this phenomenon.  I'd suggest StarsAndStripesFucking, but that's a mouthful, just like 300.

THIS SHIT. It is retarded.

Haemish will disagree but here's your example.

DnD....there's no plot, not even a single cohesive world. It's basically a blank slate to make whatever the fuck you want and what DID they make? One of the worst pile of shit movies in history.

So yes, you can fuck up G.I Joe, you can fuck up transformers, it has nothing to do with messing with the IP, it has everything to do with making a bad fucking movie.

Did you compare the 300 graphic novel to the G.I. Joe cartoon?

Again, if anything, the movie is probably slavishly faithful to the cartoon, as illustrated by Haemish's outline.  Resolute was a aberrant that turned out well despite the source material.

It is and it isn't.

Ya, the "source is shit" argument. The exception that proves the rule.  Brilliant.

Actually, DnD technically does have a "base" world, which would be Greyhawk, which was essentially the original DnD world setting.  Most of the famous DnD spells are named for Greyhawk mages (Bigby's hand spells, and the like)

Making a dark, hardcore, Conan-esque fantasy series out of He-Man doesn't make the He-Man source any more worthwhile.

Resolute and Rise share a source material and development time.  That Resolute was anything less than unmitigated shit was luck of the draw.  

Try again.

For illustration...here's your source:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3skqz_KYMFk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIDlUAx7PI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhp0QSuQ0No
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD8sOxhwQVo

Resolute was fucking atrocious. Probably the worst feature length animation I've seen.

I don't get why people are so down on the source material for things like Transformers and GI Joe. The plots of those shows were thin but they were actually pretty well-written as far as moment-to-moment stuff goes. A lot of fairly well-known, well-respected people have worked on those old Saturday morning cartoons.

I haven't watched GI Joe in a long time but I've watched the old Transformers cartoons recently and IMO they hold up very well. A lot of good dialogue, a lot of stories and situations taken from classic fare.

I was going to leave it alone, but someone else picked it up. HAHA!

"300" the graphic novel didn't respect the events that inspired 300 as a tale. "Iron Man" respected none - none - of the origin stories (unless someone re-wrote Ultimate Iron Man to be set in the Middle East, not South America, for the catalyst of his transformation) about the character and changed a number of other things to fit. LOTR is being discussed in another thread about its faithfulness to source. "Spider-Man" is probably the closest, but lest we forget the outrage over organic web shooters.

Someone else mentioned the fact that 1) the film actually needs to be good because the source won't save that, but the other thing is 2) you need to respect the source, but not slavishly follow the stupid stuff that fans get hung up on. So what if Spider-Man has organic webbing? Makes more sense (given the genre) than a high-school kid invents such an incredibly adaptive adhesive. "Iron Man" had the gist of the character's origin and Jeff Bridges was so awesome that who cares his character wasn't accurate to the comics? 300 was crazy Uncle Frank's exploration of totally not gay masculinity and how MACHO and MUSCULAR and WELL-OILED men can be when killing other men who deserve to be killed while the whores whores whores women look on.

If you are going to fork out money for the IP, you probably should use it to its fullest extent (unlike Transformers, which should be retitled "Sam Witwicky, His Hot Skankish Girlfriend and the Robots Who Transform" given the focus of the movies) but not following every little bit of lore doesn't invalidate the film. Look at "The Dark Knight". Batman kills someone through his actions. Batman kills. That's pretty much a 180 on the character. Yet it doesn't make the film any less awesome.

I think this movie should have no death in it at all. Every vehicle destroyed should have a guy somehow jumping out before the missiles hit. Every gunfight should end with somebody shooting a chandelier or some sandbags loose from the ceiling to clobber their opponent. I think it should be about a guy living on an island shaped like his own head using a mind-control device to hypnotize people into digging up diamonds to fuel a diamond-powered cloaking device that they use to turn the world's oil tankers invisible for some reason.

I think the heroes should count among their numbers a bunch of embarrassing stereotypes like an American Indian who goes around in braids and a hairband while he talks to animals, an Asian who runs into battle shirtless and barefoot so he can karate the shit out of people, and a huge black guy who speaks entirely in rhyme. I want to see guys hopping into tanks with big glass windshields and shooting each other with rockets that glide across the ground on skis. I want it to take place in like 1984, and yet somehow have every single firearm shoot laser beams despite looking like a normal gun.

I think it should be a fucking ridiculous nightmare where the villains steal DNA from Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and a fat pro wrestler to create their ultimate leader, a screaming moron wearing a giant snake head around his face. I want the whole thing to be a giant disgrace that hews as closely as possible to the quality of the source material.

The cartoons you grew up with were stupid horrible toy commercials. The movie studio bought the IP to suck in nostalgic thirtysomethings and their kids, but they weren't about to make a movie that actually followed that silly horseshit too closely. They do want to make their money back.

This is not a valid argument for turning it into halo:the movie.

Instead they took some of the old horseshit, and mixed in some of their own horseshit.  Brilliant.

A scathing condemnation of GI Joe from a fan of Star Wars, how droll.


Yousa and meesa is gunna diiiiieeeeee??

Edit: And if we want to talk about embarrassing black stereotypes the GI Joe character is a big step up from the Transformers Ghettobots or Marlon Wayans.

Halo: The Movie, was going to be awesome before it got shit canned :(


The End result is we get Distrct 9 instead, fair trade really.

That's pretty much any movie adaptation ever.  Just in this case, the new horseshit isn't any better than the old horseshit. 

Again, my point isn't that one thinks the movie looks stupid.  I'm just wondering why people are shocked given the source. If anything was going to become a live-action Team America, it was GI Joe.

Tazelbain said respect the source.  I'm saying the source isn't worth respecting in this case.

I was hoping you forgot that part of Star Wars where Jar Jar was an actual black guy rhyming about barbecue. And that part where Order 66 involved getting every Jedi in the galaxy to stand under a chandelier at the same time. Alas your memory is sharp and I am rebutted. Oh wait.

Seriously, there's summer blockbuster stupid and then on a whole different level there's eighties cartoon stupid. I didn't make anything up in that "scathing" condemnation of mine. Oh, except Cobra Commander didn't mind control people to mine diamonds for his diamond-powered oil tanker invisibility beam, he exploited a tribe of South American buttflap natives to do it. And his mountain fortress was shaped like a giant cobra head, not his own head. Totally inconspicuous and logical.

This was always going to be a brand name recognition scam and anyone who expected otherwise is retarded. It's not like somebody sat around watching a cartoon with Cobra trying to steal shaving cream to make a hole in the ozone layer and thought "This is a powerful story that must be brought to live-action film!"

EDIT: Also, what's this Halo talk? The one review I bothered to read took shots at the movie specifically for having those armor suits but only using them in one scene.

EDIT #2: That second Transformers movie is closing in on $400 million bucks domestic and over $800 million global. I haven't seen it so I'll go ahead and take people's word that it was shit, but so what? The source was shit too. All they did was replace shit with other more profitable shit.

The point of 300? The one that you missed, so so badly? It's way the fuck over there.


The very first Batman story by Bob Kane had Batman let a criminal die for punishment.

Yawn.

"G.I. Joe" is AWOL for critics (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090804/film_nm/us_gijoe)

By Carl DiOrio Carl Diorio   – 14 mins ago

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – In a highly unusual move, Paramount will open its big summer movie "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" on Friday without screening it beforehand for critics or other media.

Studio executives say they are trying to protect "Joe" from the kind of critical savaging unleashed on its recent "Transformers" sequel.

Not that the toxic reviews have affected its box office: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is the biggest movie of the year so far, with worldwide sales of $810 million.

Further, must-see interest for the first pure action movie in weeks is so high that many industryites foresee a $50 million opening weekend for "Joe." Generally, pictures are kept from critics when it's feared that poor reviews additionally will hamper an opening that's already challenged by underwhelming public interest.

"Joe" totes a reported negative cost of $175 million after a production arduous enough to spur ultimately erroneous reports of director Stephen Sommers being booted from the project. Its cast includes Dennis Quaid, Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Marlon Wayans and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Sommers has said "Joe" isn't a "Bush movie" but one more attuned to the current administration. But Paramount is giving the film a decidedly Red State marketing campaign, and the picture's premiere was held Friday at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

Other than military personnel and focus groups, only bloggers including Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News have been shown the film, an effects-laden tale of high-tech military special ops inspired by co-producer Hasbro's G.I. Joe action figure.

(Editing by dean.goodman at Reuters)

People have got to stop listening to that guy.

They are skewing meta reviews like rotten tomato's (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gi_joe/) rating by this before the weekend. Oh well I'll save my money and check out Ebert's review next week.

The Spartans were badasses? Killing Arabs is cool? A visually arresting spectacle with the depth of a fishbowl? I enjoyed the movie, but I'll be interested in hearing the 'point' of "300". Bonus if the 'point' hasn't been done better by other war movies.


Don't make me bring up Bat-mite or some weird 1960s Batman comics. Just because something has happened in a Batman comic once doesn't make it part of contemporary canon.

Batman's modern incarnation doesn't kill in the comics and hasn't for a long time.

The Dark Knight would have been a poorer film if he had saved Ras at the end of it, period.

So would Batman Begins.  :oh_i_see:

I have been served.  In my defense though, batman begins is a silly movie title.

Oh lord.  Just heard a radio ad for this and they're quoting snippets from Ain't It Cool News (which is to say, some slobbering froth from Harry Knowles)

Frank Miller is about the farthest thing from a rah rah military cheerleader as you can get. 300 was typical of his work - it relies very heavily on highly archetypal characters who act in completely over-the-top ways for emphasis. You could almost say that 300 was historical war fiction done through the lens of film noir, with as much emphasis being on the visual style as on the paper-thin story. It was an ironic story showing the weakness of a society who deified military conquest and the conquerors - they were portrayed as superhuman (mainly because the narrator of the story was retelling it to his men to give it the weight of mythology) and yet the superhumans were betrayed by the weakest member of their society, an outcast who was disqualified for service because of his supposed weakness. The Spartans disdained the Athenians as boy lovers (while practicing homosexuality themselves though that isn't portrayed), yet in the end, they needed Athenian help to fight off the Persians. You got distracted by the style and missed the point completely.


But that doesn't mean he is averse to letting someone die by their own evil actions. Sure, the character has gone through various incarnations and for the most part, doesn't kill himself (and didn't in the movies). But the character in both of the latest Batman films is true to the character told in the first Batman story.

I heard this on NPR: "Michael Bay is to movie making what hurricane Katrina was to urban planning."

Every single time I see a new trailer or clip with the baroness speaking like she's from california, I did a little inside.

Ironwood, back me up here?

/threadjack
Mind you, I thought 300 was visually interesting and had some set-pieces I liked in between the painful dialogue and bad scripting. But Haemish, really, Miller DOES have his obsessions. Rah-rah isn't it, quite, you're right about that. It's more that he likes a certain kind of damaged, violent masculinity and exalts it in some pretty fucking odd ways. So in the case of the source comic and the movie, the numbers of things he's either overlooking or glossing over are pretty substantial. The Spartans were by any contemporary metric pretty goddamn evil motherfuckers: about the only thing you can say that's noble by contemporary standards is that they were in the context of 300, rabid nationalists. (Though not very much later than this, they turned into imperialists in their own right.) If Miller were making a mythic, no-frills exploration of desperate men engaged in desperate violence at Thermopylae *on both sides*, that might get close to what you're thinking about. But the comic and far more so the movie pretty much dishes up the "effeminate dark-skinned guys vs. manly white dudes", which isn't really anything like the world of the Eastern Mediterranean in this time. New book on Xenophon's expedition to Persia some time after Thermopylae and the Peloponnesian Wars is a kind of wake-up call about what that historical world was really like.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion of how Snake-Eyes shouldn't be in armor or whatever. I have to say I'm almost tempted to see it just to see Eccleston as Destro.

Yeah, screw him for not seeing the subtle irony that largely wasn't included in the story.

The Spartans' disdain of the Athenians as "boy lovers" wasn't as hypocritical as you seem to be thinking.  The implied contrast isn't to "girl lover", but to "man lover".  The Spartans thought the Athenians were pussies because they liked their gay lovers soft and boyish, rather than tough and manly.  (Or so says John Boswell.)

You missed it again. It wasn't about BOTH sides, it was about one side and the myths they make of their own heroes in order to bolster nationalism. It was absolutely not meant to be a fair or accurate representation of the Persians, but of the jaundiced and degraded way a military society must portray its enemies. The story is an absolute exaggeration by the narrator to make his soldiers ready to slaughter the enemy - and to make the enemy seem human, with his own justifications for acting would only weaken the inspirational nature of the story. If you want your troops to fight like devils, make sure they view the enemy as the worst evil you can think of. The enemy is an inhuman mass of slaves and mutant demons led by a demonic lord. Having the narrator describe the Persians as anything other than that wouldn't fit the bill.

Guys, it's Frank Miller. He just wanted to draw people being bad ass motherfuckers, and chose a legend that fit the bill. There's no deeper meaning.


Also, on the thing about the freak betraying them, Leonidas actually gave Quasimodo a good reason not to join, he didn't dismiss him at first glance.

AfAIK GI Joe was marketed in Europe as "Action man."

Oddly, the movie is out in Europe as GI Joe  :grin:

The 80's cartoon over here was called Action Force. I was honestly confused the first time I saw it as G.I. Joe and I thought they'd just had a new intro. Admittedly the, "Go Joe!" cry was better than, "Full Force!"

I liked the European version of the intro to the animated 80's movie. INTERNATIONAL HEROES! LA LA LA LA! PLEASE IGNORE THEM LITERALLY WAVING AN AMERICAN FLAG WHILE STANDING ON TOP OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY! INTERNATIONAL!

Ever see the episode where the Joes go into a parallel universe where Cobra rules the world? Yeah, there was a lot of silly shit in the original cartoon, but the cool bits are what the 30something nostalgia geeks want. A liberal sprinkling of that nostalgic awesome mixed with a fresh look at the franchise. This shit isn't rocket science, it just gets second guessed to death by guys in suits who think that they can reduce entertainment to a formula.

From my experiencing studying screenwriting, entertainment is, actually, a formula you in most cases that you can follow.

Full Force is a far better catchphrase/double entendre.

Then you need to read more William Goldman.

Structure is one thing - entertainment is something else entirely.

Yeah but the regular series intro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1RBEqRt52Y) seems way more awesome to me. The movie one was pretty :facepalm:

Edit: Nostalgia led me to watch an episode of GI Joe that involves the Joes being sent in because the police and national guard can't deal with 3 hoodlums throwing tomatoes at a mayoral candidate. Around the 5 minute mark and one of the dreadnoughts has complained that the kids bollocksed it up and I giggled like a school girl. I can only hope whoever wrote that knew exactly what it meant.

Where's "over here"? I don't recall there ever being an Action Force cartoon nor a "Full Force!" battle cry. I remember the comics that featured in Battle (later Battle Action Force) and I remember the slow transition from Action Force to GI Joe although that was after my time.

UK, I'm talking about the mid-80s cartoon when I talk about Action Force and they definitely did go, "Full Force!" Although since it was done half assedly and dubbed over the original VA it usually sounded like about 4 bored Americans going full force. I remember this distinctly through the rosey tinted spectacles of childhood.

Found out what you were talking about and yeah, never saw it. This was more my period - early 80s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDPEsh4O2eo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDPEsh4O2eo)

Hey, man, I go back to when GI Joe was a full 12-inch doll with a manly beard and everything. http://www.users.vance.net/grayarea/1431landadvwbox.html

Man, they really should have sprung for something more than two singers and a Casio. I don't know what the problem was anyway. Nickelodeon used to run some British cartoons over here back when I was a kid, and they were still British. I sat blankly through jokes about soccer and wondered why the hell they were using the word biscuit to refer to cookies.

Are we really defending Frank Miller here? Frank Miller? Jesus, come on.

Well, SORT of a good reason. They didn't actually fight in that formation past the very first fight. I understand why, of course, watching a bunch of men huddling behind shields for two hours is not exactly exciting, but I thought it was funny anyway.

Also, 300 is possibly the most braindead movie I have ever seen (probably also the gayest), and I think it's adorable anyone would find a meaning in it deeper than "SPARTANS WERE BAD ASS WOO."

Worse - we're defending Frank Miller's storytelling subtlety.  :ye_gods:

I haven't heard her yet. 

(I assume you died a little inside...)

Yes, now fuck off. I will defend just about any Frank Miller story, bar the Spirit movie and the Dark Knight sequel (Strikes Back I think it was).

In the comic they never broke formation, IIRC. Leonidas also spends more time with Quasimodo there.


Hear hear. I'll defend them as works of raw awesome machoness, though, not as something with "deeper" psychological values worthy of scrutiny.

I think half of my confusion on this is that you of all people are defending him. 300 was hypermasculine, jingoistic bullshit with a generous side of racism. I don't know how to put it with out getting this sucked into the vortex of the Politics forum, but it just doesn't really seem like your thing.

So, back on track, the G.I. Joe movie released to theaters today.  Anyone see it yet?

(http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y222/Abagadro/the-other-half.jpg)

That should be in the Funny Pictures thread.

Frank Miller is one of my favorite artists/writers ever. Other than the aforementioned stinkers of his, I've liked all of his work. And again, you completely missed the entire fucking point of 300. You want to assume there is nothing underneath the surface of 300, that's your lookout, but IIRC, it has been stated by the author himself that there is more to that story than it appears.

I saw it at a free screening last night.  It was better than Transformers, however I felt they spent too much effort on fan service (cramming in every character, vehicle and backstory, ever) and not enough of making a good solid story.  Would work better if it was an origin of G.I.Joe instead of the team already existing, thousands strong, and just showing us how Duke and Ripcord join (training montage!).

Overall, I enjoyed it and wouldn't be mad if I'd spent $10 to see it, but it definitely isn't a great film by any stretch.  I do hope that the inevitable G.I.Joe 2 is an upswing instead of Transformers 2's downswing.

Not bad? That's good enough for me! YO JOE!

You think they crammed a bunch of characters and vehicles in as fan service?  It was all done for the toy line.

Edit: And now that people outside their select group are starting to see the movie, the score on Rotten Tomatoes has plunged 46% so far (was at 85% when I checked yesterday, and now is at 39%).

YO TWEET!

I watched it earlier this afternoon and it was quite enjoyable.

Baroness Miller was amazingly hot, lots of things went boom, shoe horned back stories were not horrifically bad, obvious setup for future movies was obvious, plenty of bouncing boobies, limited shaky cam, loads of amusing ways that henchmen died and not too many awful jokes.

The last scene of the movie should have been left on the cutting room floor though.

Of course the movie has tons of intros and backstory.  Hell, the movie is about the Rise of Cobra and the formation of GI Joe.  Cobra doesn't even exist til like the end of the movie.

Oh what was that final scene?  :grin:

Not entirely correct... at the beginning of the movie, G.I.Joe already exists and has thousands of members and has undertaken many super secret missions that most of the world is unaware of.  When the movie starts, G.I.Joe has existed for at least 4 years, conceivably longer.

Are they actually called G.I. Joe?

So the Eiffel Tower gets blown up and there is a training montage. Are you sure they didn't just remake Team America?

I laughed so hard at the action sequences in Paris, so many of them were straight out of Team America World Police.

I fully expect to see a special edition box set containing G.I. Joe and Team America World Police coming out around Christmas time.

Oh, and please do not bring your kids to see this movie.  Some of the deaths are really brutal, and i have to say I am amazed this movie did not get an R rating.

I think Ripcord was probably the most :facepalm: element of this film for me. When did the idiot/slapstick comedy buddy comedy thing become a requirement in all action films? Why does someone get into the most elite military unit on the planet because they happen to be friends with someone who's really, really good and why the hell do you then send them straight into front line missions with millions of lives at risk using equipment they apparently don't understand?

On the other hand the whole underwater base/submarine battle thing was 100% GI Joe and great popcorn flick stuff, if only they could have avoided the temptation to flesh all the characters out and give them compelling personal stakes in things. They're soldiers and there are millions of lives at risk, it seems overkill to create romantic tensions so that everything going on can be extra special compelling for one of the onlookers/participants.
Sorry for the derail, we can go back to discussing the subtle irony of Frank Miller and issues of patriotism in cinema: Should American flags be bigger and explodier?

Edit: Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure no Scottish people speak 'Celtic'

Half of them do.

The other half, Rangers.

Hahaha...

Gaelic is an official language in Scotland and is spoken by pretty much everyone in the Outer Hebrides.

Action Man is quite different to GI Joe, though they are related. AM was never a simple rebranding though.

I saw it and I enjoyed it. It was better than anything Sommers has done since the first Mummy. Ripcord wasn't nearly as bad as I was afraid he would be. I went in expecting to hate every scene he was in but he was mostly tolerable. I think it's because Sommers or someone told him to keep the mugging to a minimum so he mostly acted, at least as much as a Wayans can.

BTW, to answer Nowhereman's question


Also, I liked their version of Cobra Commander though I must say



ETA: About the "Celtic" part. I'm pretty sure she said Gaeliic the first time but changed it to "Celtic" after he didn't understand her.

I saw it tonight.

It was much better than it had any right to be. Decent action film. The more you care, the worse it'll be. And the worse scenes were in the trailer.

I was actually disappointed that it wasn't horrible.

Ok but I hadn't ever heard people refer to the language as Celtic before, I was under the impression that referred to racial/cultural things while Gaelic was the name of the language.

Much better than Transforrmers 2, though I would have liked a comment from the news report like "..hundreds of people killed in Paris by American soilders..." in the background at some point.

(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/MoreYouKnow.jpg)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages)

Everyone knows that if you have a Scot in your film he/she must be immediately nicknamed Scotty.  And be a drunk.  And excitable.

And yet no Hollywood movie has depicted Iron Bru.

HAH!

Before I launch into my indepth review of this film, let me clear something up.  I got what I wanted out of this film.  Now onto the review :

GI Joe:  The Rise of Cobra was utter shite.

The only thing that could make that  be more of a turd would have been  for Snake Eyes to have said, "let's go" to Duke  upon getting onto that transport.

but the boom boom parts were sufficiently boomy without bing totally Bayesque.

That street in Paris would have been one large gasoline fire in Bay's version

Saw it.  Was definitely better than expected.  I'm trying to figure out how a damned GI Joe movie could reasonably turn out any better, and I'm coming up empty.

Also, I need to go on record as saying that the chick who played Scarlett is extremely yummy.  Baroness is getting all the press, because she is also pant-creamingly hot, but holy shit.  Next move should simply be GI Joe: Baroness and Scarlett Run Around in Cleavage Revealing Tops for 2 Hours.

Ummmm, did you miss the part where 1) his shooting scores were just under the record for the course (i.e. just worse than Scarlett's) or that he was combat jet rated? The character was more than qualified to be on the team.



Overall, I really dug this flick. It was exactly what I expected - a silly, cartoony action flick with over the top action and SPLOSIONS!!!!

Thanks guys.  My rational mind was saying that these were possibilities, but the pre-teen boy in me was very distraught.

They didn't pitch you out of the theater for wanking to the baroness?  I'm moving to Scotland...

The Scottish accents were the worst I've ever, ever heard.

The wife and I were trying to figure out who we thought should have played Destro (you know, with a real fucking accent) but simply couldn't manage it.  Then we got on to the fun game of who could possibly be worse.  Eventually we hit the rock bottom that was Groundskeeper Willie and we STILL thought he'd do a better job than Eccleston.  First fucking Scottish Arms Dealer from the Coal Mine.  Jesus, he was really just paying the fucking mortgage.  Don't even get me started on the arms dealer that puts the MacOS into his fucking jets.  Jesus, that was painfully bad.

Scarlett was yummy (and, actually, I thought wasn't bad at acting either).  Good God 'Duke' was horrendous.  Really, really, really painful to listen to and watch. Dennis Quaid was fucking awful and didn't even bother to try.  Wayans didn't suck at all, a surprise for him.  The 'Suits' were actually ok, though Willing suspense of disbelief was constantly stretched.  "This Ninjas Fast".

It was funny, however, to see The Mummy regulars popping in.

Finally, Blonde Girl getting it.  Awesome.

First off I actually liked the movie, it was pretty much what I was expecting.

Also as for the cameo's, I'm really surprised they just didn't make Brendan Fraser into Beach-Head.

You have clearly not thought thrrough the ramifications of attending a theater in which they don't throw out the wankers.

(http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/040402/tdy_stone_peewee_040402.300w.jpg)

Hey, if Pee-Wee wants to beat off to Baroness pr0n, I support his choice!

Until he had your seat in the previous showing.  :ye_gods:

I would be more concerned about sitting in the seat in front of Pee Wee.

Saw it last Thursday. Have been waiting for the rage to cool.

If I hadn't been a total GI Joe addict growing up, it would be pleasant summertime fun.

But the changes to the backstories and character relationships drove me up the fucking wall.

Sorry, Jason, they didn't really leave it as open as you think.

Yeah, I gotta say that it only makes sense that SS killed him.  That was the moment when he started down the path of awesome.

I was worried that the whole movie was going to be a bunch of exo-suit stupid from start to finish.  Thankfully, they only used them in one scene, and it even seemed appropriate.  I also like that the bad guys actually did their fair share of kicking ass and killing Joes.

Support that with evidence from the movie, because from what I saw things went down exactly as I described. They avoided definitively stating anything.

While in the comics there was a great deal of ambiguity to the character of Storm Shadow and confusion surrounding the death of the Hard Master, in the film, there clearly wasn't.

Stormshadow in the film was a total fucking nutter.  I don't mean just a killer.  That's easy to define.  I'm talking a complete fucking douchebag.

Everything, from twirling stars to gutting people Jealously (justified in my mind) over the Baronesses extremely fine rack, everything just screamed "I was passed over as a kid and now I'm fucking, fucking, fucking NUTS."

Also, there wasn't any great shakes or confusion over 'the look' given between the two brothers.  It was 'I've just fucking gutted that chap and he totally deserved it because you beat me at racquetball' and not so much "wistful, omg, I must now go down a bad path to catch the killer who'll improbably turn out to be someone who should also be 12 at the time."

Further, he had a whole fucking stupid fight to come clean to Snake-eyes.  Which was when he SHOULD HAVE.  Sure, they may reintroduce this in later movies, but you know what ?  It'd be fucking stupid.  It would totally break the vow of silence when Snake-eyes pipes up "Why didn't you say that before I GUTTED YOU LAST TIME YOU CUNT."

Sorry.  I know you're nerding out.  I did too when they showed us the backstory.  But they fucked it.

Indeed.  This is not the Storm Shadow that could possibly join the Joes.  Though I like that Storm Shadow, this Storm Shadow is a killer.  With style, and without remorse.

It is left open despite you not wanting it to be.  If they didn't want it to be open then he would have just said, "You took your vow of silence after I killed the Hard Master."  They made the whole thing ambiguous on purpose so that if they want to go down the "He didn't really kill the Hard Master" router they can.  If they'd wanted it to be clear they'd have just showed him stab the guy or had him admit to it.

I'm not nerding out... I'm just stating what is actually in the movie, not things people choose to infer because they want them to be a certain way.  In the movie, it is not definitive who killed the Hard Master, so lame script/plot or not, in a sequel they can go either way.

Never underestimate the stupidity and lameness of Hollywood when blockbuster box office receipts are on the line.

I may be hallucinating but I could swear someone called him Sgt Slaughter.

Also, Xerapis, I liked GI Joe too and still have some old comic books in a box. But really? Nerd rage? Over changing the backstories of plastic toys? Really?

You didn't listen to a word I said.

 :oh_i_see:

Clearly reading comprehension is the other half of the battle.

I can only assume what you wanted was to encourage studios to give the greenlight to more explosion filled trash with a tie-in toy line and '80s nostalgia.  Thanks for that.

You forgot the really smoking hot chicks.  Please pay more attention next time.

Read More Thread.

Yes, really.

Not so much just changing, but changing for the worse, and for no good reason. Why try to make everyone in the film related somehow? It's not necessary. The change to Storm Shadow diminishes his character depth. Why even create that absurd backstory for Cobra Commander?

This is my nerd rage. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Umm yes... because the whole Cobra-La background for Cobra Commander is so much better than the one in the movie.   :why_so_serious:

So why was the US President British?

I thought of a good parallel to GI Joe nerdrage: Super Mario Brothers. There was the live action movie, which was dark and gritty and grounded in reality...and then there was the cartoon where bushes danced and the sun wore sunglasses, and Yoshi was big and fat and giggled a lot while he ate berries. I'm guessing the rage over this weird alternate GI Joe is similar to rage over trying to make SeriousBusiness out of Mario jumping on shit.

We do not acknowledge the existence of the animated GI Joe movie.

There's a certain amount of mental gymnastics needed for most fandom.  They probably just ignore the things they don't like.

My nerdrage is directed solely at the voice of cobra commander.  He's not fucking darth vader, it's a shrill, yelly voice.  Fuuuuuck you hollywood.

Ice floats.

Actually, the best part is he did the voice spot on when he took off the breather.

Yeah, I had to turn my brain off for that part.  Told myself that all the huge slabs of ice must have been weighed down by all manner of machinery.

I tried that.  I was all like, "Shut up brain, it's full of steel conduit." and then my brain was all like, "You mean air bubbles?"

Yeah, well maybe those air bubbles were packed with some invisible gas that's far heavier than regular air?  OMG WAIT.  They were also crawling with invisible nano-mites, and those things are pure metal.

Ok, shut up all of you. This was an asskicker popcorn movie, with hot chicks fighting each other, and just barely not too much Marlon Wayans.

Really though, I quite enjoyed it. While it was full of braindead moments, I liked the fact that they tried to have an explanation or motivation behind each character, especially the bad guys - except maybe Zartan, who's motivation seemed to be that he liked stabbing people.

I think the biggest suprise for me was how much I didn't care for Eccelston, who I've loved in everything else he's done. I really think it was the atrocious accent.

Yes.

Despite making fun of the falling ice chunks, I agree with you.  I liked this movie a surprising amount.

Also, isn't that what a Scottish accent is supposed to sound like?

/runsforthehills

Watch Stargate Atlantis.  Watch the Doctor.

That's what it sounds like.

For special kicks, track down the episode where they're 'writing home' to love ones through the compression video camera.  See how he reacts when talking to his mum ?  That's what Scottish people sound AND feel like.

Went last night with the wife.
Well as the token guy who normally likes all the explosion filled pop corn movies... I didnt really like this. I didnt not like but was more "meh" as an over all feeling about it.

The CG sucked. Flat out sucked. And normally Im not one to get all nerd bitchy about shit like that. That first scene where the Osprey jet rip offs were hovering down into the giant mechanical asshole in the sand...that couldnt have gotten any worse. There were a few scenes like that where the awfulness of the CG just leapt out at me.

Baroness versus Scarlett.......Scarlett wins hands down. Holy shit her red-haired-giant-tittiness had me turned on when the wife and I got home last night.

The sequel should be GI Joe: Scarlett in the Bikini Battle

Fake edit- Why doesnt spellcheck like "leapt"? Its a word.

Lust is thy name.....
(http://cdn.buzznet.com/media/jj1//2008/05/nichols-gi-joe/rachel-nichols-gi-joe-06.jpg)

Yum.

The average ginger just doesn't do it for me, but this is the clear exception to the rule.  And she cleans up amazingly good.

You mean like this? :drill:

I saw this for free piggybacking off Inglorious Basterds.

I'm glad I did. Paying for it would has ruined what little entertainment that wasn't T&A appreciation that I got out of this film.

You mean the fact that they actually went out of their way to point out in the movie that it was ice and steel by SAYING OUT LOUD that it was ice and steel wasn't enough?  Finally watched this on blue ray last night, loved it for the most part.  I specially liked Storm Shadow and Baroness basically waltzing into the super secret JOE fortress and walking out with the super secret bombs after kicking the shit out of everyone.   Hope it made enough money for a sequel.

"It had some steel in it." isn't really a very good answer, it's about the displacement.  You see?

Let me put it this way.  The ice was floating with the steel in it ALREADY.

My biggest problem with the movie was when Heavy Duty said "Yo Joe!" it wasn't big enough. He just sorta kinda said it. I wanted a huge, drawn-out "YOOOOOOOOOO JOE!!!!!"

I loved how they didn't explain away nicknames. I hate that. "Wow, that scientist is a real...mind...BENDER!!!!!" No, his name was Doctor Mindbender, and that's that, like he was born with it.

Which was part of the surface ice flow.  So once the chunks of steel and ice were blown free, there was less ice to help to keep it floating.

I honestly think the recent G.I. Joe comic does a way better version of GI Joe getting started than this movie. It's not really any more realistic but the first storyline mostly consists of Snake Eyes out to prove that there's this super secret terrorist organisation called Cobra and goes rogue with Scarlet helping him and ensuing firefights and arrests of GI Joe rogue agents along with whole towns in America that are secretly Cobra run, etc. It's over the top and ridiculous but in a far more awesome way than this film was.

I really don't think so, these things were ice mountains pretty much.  Displacing millions of tons of salt water (which is already more buoyant).  I don't think we ever saw near enough steel structure in the surface area to even come close to sinking them.  Add to the that the fact that none of the steel was solid, it's all hollow (conduits and building structures) and probably trapping air thus displacing more water for it's given mass I'm just not buying it.

I mean, steel ships with just a little air trapped in them sit and bob around on the surface for days while they are sinking.  Just saying it had steel in it doesn't cut it.

Finally bothered to acquire this, yikes, terrible terrible movie.

+1 amazed I found a redhead so hot, I really loved those black plastic boob armor vests they kept putting her in.

Storm Shadow was way cooler then Snake Eyes and neither was as cool as they should have been considering they were ninjas.

Watched it today thanks to Netflix.  It was a fun movie with hot chicks.  And they tried to have some character development anyway.  My expectations were pretty low, so I was pleasantly surprised.  Did I mention the hot chicks?  OMG the redhead, oh meow!  And yes, I liked it too when outnumbered Cobra agents break into the MAIN GIJoe base and kick ass.  Good job making the bad guys bad-ass!  Lastly, I really liked Cobra Commanders origin.  Didn't see it coming.

I never was a fan of the cartoon, but I would go see a sequel.  As long as the red-head keeps wearing skintight outfits!

Making this arise from the grave just to mention that it just went up on Netflix streaming.

So I was bored and watched it.

Hot chicks were hot.

Got confused because I remember Duke and Scarlett being an item as a kid so that was kinda weird. Marlon Wayons was less annoying than the guy who played Duke to me.

Overall enjoyed it because I was not expecting much.

Actually in the comics Scarlet and Snake Eyes were an item and he couldn't talk because he'd gotten a mouthful of flame while saving her life during a mission.

So basically he was every woman's dream. Other than being horribly disfigured.

Doesn't Snake Eyes even speak her name out loud when she's near death?