Blood for the Baron!

Ok I was lucky enough to catch this just now at a preview screening (ahead of most of America!).
Went the whole hog and bought a VIP/box tickets for me and the missus at Cineworld in High Wyc.
There were about 40 people in there, the whole cinema was very quiet generally.

Wasn't sure what to expect given the negative comments from the die hard "childhood rape" fanbase.
I haven't read the IDW novelisation, but am loyal to the Marvel/Devils Due Canon.

Generally:
Let me say that this film is good fun, it starts with a period drama, then fast forwards to the future, each character is slowly introduced, and tongue-in-cheek, each seems to have a flashback, there were more flashbacks than an episode of Family Guy!
The story is interesting, and has a few twists, but can be predictable.
Some of the subtitles are obivous pointers to what you're watching e.g. "Duke's Flashback 4 years ago", which is a bit stupid.
There are so many nods to the joe Community through out- Breaker chewing his gum, Hawk saying, "knowing is half the Battle", the USS Flagg!! etc.
There are lots of light hearted comments and in-jokes through out which work well.
Similar in theme to X-men.

In more detail:
the pros-
Snake Eyes was FANTASTIC, his entrance is cool, and he maintains his stealthy image throughout. assume he may have a spin off film, like Wolverine.
Scarlett is very nicely balanced, brains, brawn and beauty.
Storm Shadow- way cool, (how will he come back for sequel?- cold water/nanaomites?)- how many kills?
Zartan- ruthless MF!
Baroness- great femme Fatale, till the nanomite excuse....
Breaker- I like this version too.
Hawk- well cast.
Ripcord- ok if we pretend this is a new character, then he comes across ok, good for a laff only though.
Cobra Commander- JLH did a brilliant job on the voice.
The Violence level is very graphic, bullets (not lasers), fairly high body count!!!! including lots of slashing/knives/large swords in people/2 kids beating the crap out of each other (this is not for young children- it is 12A).
The vehicles were nicely done e.g. the night raven.
The Gadgets were cool on both sides- the accelerator suits were slighlty OTT.
Obvious sequel coming....


the cons-
the acting isn't great, and you feel it around the "femotional" scenes, e.g. duke feeling guilty over the death of Rex
the Baroness & Duke story line is odd, but I can see what Hollywood were trying to do, conflict of interest/duty etc, but then blaming it all on nanomites- ???
nanomites, - bit too overused to explain everything, its like the damned radioactive spider from Spider man escaped and bit everyone!
Cobra Commander's first name is REX??? what a dumb ass name! also did not like either outfit.
cover girl buys the farm!!! noooo!
could have done with a better score/or a theme tune.

Overall 9/10 I had fun watching this!
and will likley go a few more times!!!

Great review Spec Ops the flashbacks were done that way to tie in the story from Above & Beyond the prequel novel except for Snake Eyes backstory I heard there will be a sequel already by Stephen Sommers.

I caught it last night too, Empire Cinema in Swindon and I can't really add anything to your great review... although I will say it's fun but when it's bad it does have that Street Fighter feel about it (I know that assessment is widely used but I feel it's an appropriate one) and I was kind of pissed with Zartan's character: he was basically Arnold Vosloo being himself and putting on a hat to become the guy he was pretending to be, had little or no screentime and then gets nanomites'd and they show a clip of the President of the USA whistling the same tune Zartan whistled throughout the film...no chameleon effects or anything

I think the positive thing is atleast it's out there in a live action form and in some shape or form there'll be a sequel or atleast a reboot-esque thing one day...oh, and give Cobra Commander a hood, please?

I did dig CC's line near the end though, what was it? "You can call me COMMANDER!" and you see the COBRA emblem on the sub? That was the nearest to spine-tingling the film got for me

Edit: Almost forgot, The guy from California Man and The Mummy's cameo: utterly pointless and kind of made me cringe Were we 'sposed to believe he was a high-ranking Joe??

I also read an interview with Sommers saying the accelerator suits and mole-sub things were ideas he had for other films and worked them into the story, you could tell this because they felt stupid and out of place even for GI Joe

The special effect were SHOCKING also, it was like something you'd see on one of those 3-on-1 Horror dvds with Sharks vs Dinosaurs or something They actually looked unfinished to me...They didn't seem to have any shadow, shading or wear to them to integrate them into the scenes.

its interesting - the mole pod and accelerator suits are credited as being created by the Stan Winston Workshop.

the Mole pods work functionallyin the film, and invasion of the pit harks back to 3 comic versions ( 2 marvel, 1 DDP) of this!

the suits, were explained well, and the joes needed hi-tech stuff to defeat cobra, but the chase seq in Praguq/Paris which is in the trailers is a bit stupid, Snake Eyes can run as fast, jump as high, and manages to stay on the chase vehicle better than the clowns in suits!

SPEC OPS wrote:its interesting - the mole pod and accelerator suits are credited as being created by the Stan Winston Workshop.

the Mole pods work functionallyin the film, and invasion of the pit harks back to 3 comic versions ( 2 marvel, 1 DDP) of this!

the suits, were explained well, and the joes needed hi-tech stuff to defeat cobra, but the chase seq in Praguq/Paris which is in the trailers is a bit stupid, Snake Eyes can run as fast, jump as high, and manages to stay on the chase vehicle better than the clowns in suits!

Really? I was only going off this interview with Sommers by Superhero Hype:

[SNIP]... SHH!: Absolutely. I saw a bit of it at ShoWest but that was just a very small part of a much longer sequence. I'm really curious about doing stuff like that. Are you really big on building sets or using models or do you end up doing a lot of it using CG?
Sommers: Everything. When did CG become this terrible thing? I love Ray Harryhausen. Do you want me to go back to claymation? So what we do in all these sequences is we try to shoot as much reality as possible. Take for instance the accelerator suit chase sequence through Paris. We went to Paris. it wasn't all shot in Paris, but a lot of it was, and we destroyed somewhere between 112 and 120 cars. It was a record. I guess we beat "Blues Brothers" somewhere. So you try to make it as real as possible and then you'll put in miniatures and models and matte paintings and the CG work. If it's all CG you can just smell that and they're getting much better now. In fact, sometimes they don't want you to put certain things in. They'll say, "Keep the snow and the rain out. We'll put that in later," so we play around with that. In Paris we had cameras in helicopters, we had cameras in trucks, cars, motorcycles. You have to really shoot the sh*t out of it and then you add the layers of CG.

SHH!: Even from when I saw it at ShoWest, it obviously had improved quite a bit since then. When you got the first script, was a lot of that stuff already in there?
Sommers: Well that sequence has been in my head for over a decade. I had the idea for the accelerator suits over a decade ago.

SHH!: Before "G.I. Joe?"
Sommers: Yeah, this is way before I'd even heard of "G.I. Joe." I actually wrote a script called "Accelerator" which I had one draft and didn't get to finish. I ended up going onto something else very quickly, but I had this idea. At one point when, now in the movie they jump through a train and when I wrote it they went through a truck. But now, 10 years later I'm like, "Oh, I didn't make them jump through a truck, let's make it a train." In fact, I think it was Stuart Beattie's idea to make it a train.

SHH!: It was cool that you had that idea and that it worked in this setting.
Sommers: A lot of the ideas I've had, like the Mole Pods. I've had that in my head since I was a little kid about being able to burrow under the earth. So, what was great about this movie is that they gave me this fantastic world, these great characters, and I got to come up with a story and throw a lot of my imagination and creativity into it, things I'd been thinking about for a long time. ...[SNIP]


Seems like someones accepting other peoples credit

maybe Sommers had the idea, and Winston Studio's fleshed it out?

SPEC OPS wrote:maybe Sommers had the idea, and Winston Studio's fleshed it out?

Yeah, that's way better than my stupid theory

people having ideas kicking around for years before using them and not necessarily how they intended is nothing new. there's an author i've talked to who wrote a Trek novel that he'd rewritten from a Voyager script that he'd adapted from an original novel.

Taking my son to see this tomorrow !

Im not expecting too much from it, so I know I wont be dissappointed !

I saw it today Andy. I enjoyed it, it was two hours of escapism into movie world. I never over analyse films just enjoy the break from reality. Plus the Baronesses outfits helped too!

Hope you enjoy it.