Monday 12 December 2011

Cobra Commander Looks Like Cobra Commander

I'm "that guy" who really liked Stephen Sommers' first "G.I. Joe" movie. Yeah, it was far from perfect - mostly thanks to having been a "strike script" victim - but from where I sat it more-or-less delivered a faithful-in-tone adaptation of the animated series and comics (read: aggressively silly scifi-military nonsense as-envisioned by 8-year olds playing with action figures) and I maintain that most of the excessively-negative reactions would've been greatly reduced if it had been the same movie but with more source-accurate costuming...

...which more or less seems to be what the out-of-nowhere AWESOME debut trailer for the sequel, "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," is offering:



The new director is John M. Chu, who's mostly made dance and concert movies up to this point. At some point he'd made some noise about this one going "dark and gritty," but this looks like anything but: It's the same basic look and feel as the first one, just with bigger action heroes in the cast (The Rock is "RoadBlock," who is apparently our new lead, while Bruce Willis is supposedly playing a retired soldier named "Joe" from whom the organization derives it's name) and characters like Cobra Commander, Snake Eyes and Jinx (Jinx? For real?) looking more like they're "supposed to." But does that make it look "better?"

...Yeah, kinda. I'll admit it: Seeing Cobra Commander in the blue uniform with the mirrored-faceplate is all kinds of awesome, I'm always a sucker for color-coded ninjas and the 'money shot' of the Cobra Flag flying over the White House is sort of incredible.

I wonder how "seriously" to take the storyline implications in this particular trailer, though - are they really so committed to the "sorry about the last one" angle that they'll kill off everyone from the first one except Snake Eyes, which is what the trailer is implying?

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