Review: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Facts & Figures

• Title: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
• IMDB rating at time of writing: 5.8
• Year: 2009
• Length: 113 minutes
• Country: United States
• Director: Stephen Sommers
• Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Bob Ducsay & Brian Goldner
• Writers: Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, Paul Lovett, Michael B. Gordon, Stephen Sommers & Larry Hama
• Cinematography: Mitchell Amundsen
• Music: Alan Silvestri
• Cast: Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Marlon Wayans, Rachel Nichols, Arnold Vosloo, Christopher Eccleston, Ray Park, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Saïd Taghmaoui, Joseph-Gorden Levitt, Sienna Miller, Jonathan Pryce & Byung-Hun Lee

Plot summary (Spoiler alert!)

The movie starts somewhere in the middle ages, where James McCullen is punished for selling weapons to rebels. He is given a metal mask, which is burnt to his face.
In the near future, a descendant of James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) is also in the weapons trade, and has developed a weapon based on nanomites. These microscopic robots eat through metals at a phenomenal rate, and one warhead loaded with nanomites is capable of destroying an entire city. NATO buys four of the nanomite-loaded warheads and a team, led by Duke (played by Channing Tatum) and his friend Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are sent to escort the weapons from the MARS-facility to the closest NATO base. Their convoy is, naturally, ambushed by a group of highly-trained and well-armed men, led by The Baroness, whom Duke recognises as his former fiancee Ana (Sienna Miller). At the last moment the warheads, Duke and Ripcord are saved by members of GI Joe: The beautiful Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), the silent yet deadly ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), the communications expert Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui) and the explosives expert Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The weapons, Duke and Ripcord are taken by the GI Joe team to their command center in Egypt, called “The Pit”, where GI Joe commander General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) takes over the weapons and gets convinced to train the duo for GI Joe.

It is revealed that McCullen, helped by the mysterious masked man known only as “The Doctor”, uses nanomites to change soldiers to unstoppable killing machines, who have no fear and who are harder to kill than any other, due to the nanomites repairing any damage to the body. He plans to steal back the warheads, having acquired the location of the Pit by using a tracker that was hidden in the case, and use them to spread panic and take control of the world (Of Course!). He sends the Baroness, the ninja Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee) and the mysterious Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) to attack the Pit and take back the weapons. At first the attack goes well, with gen. Hawk disabled, but soon the G.I. Joe teams start fighting back, forcing Storm Shadow and the Baroness to escape with a jet pack, and Zartan to quietly withdraw, disguised as a camel herder.

The Cobra-team smuggles the warheads to Paris, where they want to use a particle accelerator (in a lab owned by the Baroness’ husband), to weaponize the nanomites. The Joe’s try to stop them with a high-speed pursued through Paris, but are unable to stop one of the warheads being fired at the Eiffel tower. The Tower is destroyed, but Duke manages to hit the kill-switch of the weapon, which allows him to be captured and to be taken to McCullen’s base in the Arctic.

Throughout this, there are occasional flashbacks to the youth of Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, who grew up together and were trained in martial arts from early on in their lives. Their master always favored Snake Eyes, which caused Storm Shadow to be jealous and kill their master. Upon discovering this, Snake Eyes took a vow of silence until he could get revenge by killing Storm Shadow.

The Joe’s manage to locate the secret Cobra-base and fly there against orders, where they find out that McCullen has loaded three ballistic missiles with nanomite warheads, which he plans to use against Bejing, Moscow and Washington DC. Snake Eyes manages to take the Bejing one out, but Moscow and Washington fly off at high speed. Ripcord quickly flies off in a stolen prototype jet, while Scarlett, Breaker and Snake Eyes infiltrate the base. Snake Eyes encounters Storm Shadow and manages to kill him after a fight. Guided by Scarlett, Ripcord destroys the missile headed to Moscow and pursuits the Washington one. He misses it, but decides to use his plane as a net to catch all nanomites and take them up into the upper atmosphere, where the thin air will deactive them. Inside the base, Duke learns that the Doctor is actually Rex Lewis, the brother of Ana/The Baroness, who was a member of Duke’s squad and believed killed in an airstrike. The explosion merely disfigured him, and he was saved by Dr. Mindbender and taught everything about nanomites. In the end, his madness about being left behind made him implant his own sister with nanomites, to put her under his control, which created The Baroness out of Ana Lewis. The Baroness manages to break through the mind control to save Duke, by which McCullen gets burned by his own flamethrower when trying to kill Duke, causing him and The Doctor to flee in an escape submarine. The Doctor triggers a self-destruct sequence, by which tons of polar ice fall on the base, destroying it. Duke and Ana, back to herself, follow them in a stolen submarine.

Inside the submarine, The Doctor takes on the title of Cobra Commander and uses nanomites to heal McCullen’s face, this also causes him to fall under the Doctor’s control and gets him the new name of Destro. They are quickly captured by GI Joe after this, and are detained in a high security prison. The Baroness is placed in protective custody until all the nanomites can be removed.

In an epilogue, the American President (Jonathan Pryce), gets ambushed by Cobra agent and his identity is assumed by Zartan, having his appearance changed by nanomites, but not his identity taken over.

Review

G.I. Joe will be a name well known to many of a certain age, as it was a huge franchise of action figures made by Hasbro, which started back in the ’60′s. This was all, however, before I came around, so I won’t ramble about this. I will ramble about the movie: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. This action movie was written out of storylines that were part of the action figures, and features an ensemble cast with, among others, Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller and Christopher Eccleston.

This is a typical action movie, intended to be watched by groups of friends with a beer and a bucket of popcorn. The storylines are easy and short and the lots of action scenes are expensive with lots of effects. Therein also lies the major problem with this movie: it is pure action-intended. Nobody cares about who is related to who,  so don’t put it in the movie! Either you make a straight action movie with lots of effects and a thin storyline, and you write it as one, OR you make a movie about friendship, teamwork and anger, and put some action moments in it. This movie tried to be both, but failed at both. For a straight action movie the storylines and plot-twists (which are more like plot-roundabouts) are too complicated and confusing, they are added at random moments in the movie and have no point. Especially the whole Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow relationship in flashbacks is pointless and confusing. For a team/buddy-movie, the storylines are too confusing and too random. It is like this movie was written, but somebody came by for a cup of coffee, saw that it was about various people with no relationship to each other and decided to rewrite a few scenes, without having seen the full script.

The effects and action sequences of this movie are quite good, but can be a bit too fast and blurry, which makes it looks as if the budget for effects was gone so they just sped it up and hoped nobody noticed. It is also a pity that a lot of potential great action scenes are not written: one of the characters is an explosive expert, but spends his life in subs, driving vans and looking mean as some sort of a Mr. T fanboy.

The movie does try, but it needs more. More budget, more action and mostly more experience in direction. editing and writing. The actors all do their thing: Marlon Wayans is an unfunny funny guy with an accent who is after the ladies, Dennis Quaid is a stern general with a soft heart, Ray Park waves with various swords, Christopher Eccleston talks with a big accent, Arnold Vosloo is untrustworthy and Michael Pryce plays a civilised gentleman in a suit. The performance that I liked best, however, was Sienna Miller. She  manages to avoid being typecasted and is clearly having fun playing the bad girl in an action movie. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of her in parts like this.

Conclusions

A decent popcorn movie, but I wouldn’t watch it more than one or two times. The effects are nice, but the story is just weak and over the top, the plot twists are predictable and boring and the action moments are too long and not convincing. For an action popcorn-movie it’s 2½ out of 5 stars for me, because it DOES try to be entertaining and somewhat refreshing to the action genre. It is, however, still way more entertaining than Transformers II, which came out round the same time and was meant for the same audiences. I fear for the sequel.

Trailer on Youtube

Links
Official Site
IMDB Link
Metacritic Link
Rotten Tomatoes Link
Whatthemovie Link
Icheckmovies Link

Inception by Christopher Nolan

Let’s start by the most important, I love this movie, I wanna watch it again and maybe after I’ll rewatch it once more… so :

I have been one of the lucky few to watch this incredible movie last week-end on its premiere in Paris. After hearing the cast and crew saying how beautiful their journey have been, I have been able to watch one of the most mind-blowing movie of this year.

I’m new at reviewing movies, I read today on the bus that this was a “James Bond meets Matrix” kind of movie. Well what more to add to make you want to see it like I did ! Maybe that it comes from Christopher Nolan’s mind, who also did Memento (very tricky already), Insomnia, The Prestige and of course he gave a new edge to the Batman storyline. Nolan has a real genius to let you enter a world with different rules that you can feel right away.

We follow Dominic Cobb, a brilliant unordinary thief in industrial espionage that tries to steal the most treasured knowledge of a man by entering his mind in his own dreams.Via a “mise en abime” you can follow his team chasing this secret, creating dreams into dreams to deceive the owner’s mind.  So far their work has been about deceiving minds but what if they were to do the opposite in order to conceive an idea into someone else’s mind:  could the “inception”, or the art of making someone believe he thought by himself what his worst enemy would want him to do, be possible. For Cobb it is the only way to restore his name and return to his children and country.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio)  is the extractor, the extraction takes place in a “dream share” where you build a dream world in which you will put a subject that will see this world as real and will lead you through his subconscient to the thing you are looking for. In order to take the journey he will need a point man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) taking care of all the details of execution and disposals to awake the dreamers; an architect, Ariane (Ellen Paige) freshly arriving to their dream experience she is the anchor point to reality, she builds a similar universe to trick the subject experimenting with laws of physics. Adds up to that the forger, Eames (Tom Hardy), a cameleon able to make believe what he wants to the subject;  a chimist, enabling the team to go further in limbo and a “tourist“, Saito (Ken Watanabe) their client insisting to observe everything. The team is now ready to put a simple idea in the mark‘s mind, Robert Fischer Jr (Cillian Murphy) who is about to inheritate his father’s legacy. But they will have to deal with a darker entity in Dom’s life, Mall, the shade (Marion Cotillard) his late wife that keeps living in his mind and thwarting Dom’s plans.

The cast is stunning, Nolan’s team has the right calibre to carry the film as far as it can go, DiCaprio’s interpretation shows much refinement, all these plots into plots keep stacking up without ever making you feel lost in the process. If your mind is the scene of the crime you will keep wondering for a long time if what you think is really what is or if you’ve been wrong all along.

“IMDb Top 250 films? Top POO 50 more like!”

I don’t mean that. Believe it or not, that was quoted from one of the many extremely eloquent users of the IMDb forums. I’ll explain.

In my quest to become a bona-fide cinephile and wannabe film-snob, I needed somewhere to start. Other than a seeing what a select few people on whatthemovie posted, I didnt know where to look. A couple of my friends who were also into film a little, were working through the IMDB Top 250 film list. “Ha!” I thought. By that point I had read enough text about arthouse and indie cinema to know that anyone who watched such mainstream nonsense from the imdb top 250 were no better than personal injury lawyers, and those weird people who stand in the high street shouting swear words for no reason. I had begun my release from mainstream pop culture into the little known realm of world cinema, classic film and arthouse productions. I would NEVER sink so low as to use the imdb top 250!

And then a few weeks later… in a moment of clarity…. I realised…..

I had become a twat. A big fat movie-snob twat.

What forced this realisation upon me, was the moment I happened upon the IMDb top250 list again. I realised that many of these classics I had seen were on there! I had discovered Fritz Lang and Murnau by this point, and immensely enjoyed the films I had seen. M was a masterpiece in my eyes, as was Metropolis. Both of these are on the top250 list, respectfully placed in fact. Sunrise, one of my favourite Murnau films, was also there. “Hang on… ” I thought… “there are fucking Bergman and Fellini movies on this list! And bloody Truffaut!” Could all the harsh words I had heard about the IMDb 250 be absolute bollocks?

Well, yes and no. But largely yes.

While the list has plenty of over-rated mainstream filler, it is actually a really good list to follow if you are a novice trying to learn a little about film. Yep, I said really good. The current ranking is pretty bad (Shawshank Redemption at number 1?) but every flavour of cinema is covered in some way. Even though the list leans way over towards the popular end of the spectrum, it still manages to capture some great artistically important film. Granted, the films from the great pioneering arthouse and new-wave and realist directors were their more accessible works (Fellini’s La Strada, Truffaut’s 400 blows etc..),  but is that such a bad thing if it helps introduce people to their films?

So I worked through it. I forced myself to watch all the things I said I wouldn’t, and so far I am at 210/250. Aside from a few shitty moments I’ve bloody loved it. It hasn’t stopped me from watching some more obscure films, but it has been nice to have some focus, and a goal to obtain. It has guided me to discover some new personal favourite films regardless of their so called importance and critical acclaim (The Third Man, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Manhattan, Il Postino, La Vita e Bella, Sleuth to name a few) . It made me discover and fall head-over-heels in love with Chaplin. It made me want to seek out and watch every single inch of film Billy Wilder has ever shot. Most importantly it has also forced me to watch films I simply wouldn’t have bothered with in my earlier movie-snob mindset.

The list has also reminded me why I loved films to start with. When I was a kid, craning my neck to look up at the huge silver screen, you can bet your life I wasn’t contemplating the montage ability of Eisenstein, or the incredibly philosophical narrative of Tarkovsky. No, I was pissing my pants with excitement when E.T made Elliot’s bike fly over that tree, scared shitless and loving every second of Critters and Gremlins on pirated VHS, and rolling on the floor laughing at Richard Pryor on a subway train in See no evil, hear no evil (“I’m black!?”). The films may not have had artistic worth but they were goddamn fun (although if anyone criticizes E.T for anything I’m afraid I’m gonna have to lay a sucka down foo’).

So now I watch anything. I still prefer to study film, reading about film history and the technical process behind shooting, and my heart is still rooted deep in the golden age. I still prefer to seek out little known movies, world-cinema, and arthouse. If I like, I can be analytical of a film’s narrative, its structure, the cinematography, the dialogue. However now, I realise that it doesnt mean I can’t just enjoy a film. I can turn all that learned wankery off and just try to soak up a film for its entertainment value only. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to go and buy Alvin and the Chipmunks on DVD, but I will happily cheer with the masses watching a summer action, entertainment spectacular like Kick-Ass, and then go home and try to fathom a Gaspar Noe film.

One piece of advice I would pass on after this journey, is don’t let people tell you what to like and watch. Heard Transformers is shit but still fancy watching it? Then watch it and make your own mind up! (It is very shit by the way – but don’t listen to me!) Watch what you want, when you want, and state your own movie opinions proudly and loudly, and screw everyone else (although not at the cost of dampening friendly debate, which is one of the more enjoyable aspects of cinema).

So thank you IMDb top 250 for reminding me what movies are all about. Thanks for introducing me to some great movies, and thanks for at least trying to introduce new people to cinema other than the mass-produced.  I don’t think you are poo, you’re OK by me.

Oh, and a big fuck you for making me watch District 9.

Related links:

IMDB top 250 : Go on, it isn’t as bad as you’ve heard I promise. Just ignore the order.

iCheckMovies : More lists than you can shake a Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range at.