mendax.org

Why wouldn’t a child of the 80s find a modern G.I. Joe movie fantastic? Given the veritable success of the recent Transformers movie, a G.I. Joe movie seems like a logical move. That is, until one realizes that G.I. Joe is full of campy nonsense much like the Ewoks that heralded Star Wars’ demise.

When the minds behind the Transformers movie decided to not to make Megatron turn into a little gun, fans may have been upset, but let’s be fair: the ultimate transforming villain turning into what looks like a German handgun isn’t all that cool compared to the bad guy who turns into frikken tank. The point is, what we all thought was cool in a cartoon just doesn’t translate well into a live action film.

So why the G.I. Joe movie diss? We’ll be the first to say that early promotional pictures of key characters looked good, but more recent pictures make the whole venture just seem lame. The chief problem, of course, is that one of the factors that made G.I. Joe appealing to kids was that each character had a pretty unique personality and look, creating a harlequin of an army. But that army wasn’t realistic, because all they ended up killing were machines, and even towards the end of the cartoon’s run, the only Joe to come close to dying woke up from a short coma.

Sadly, an authentic G.I. Joe movie won’t do to keep the old fans cheering. Rather, the movie writers need to change some key components to the original story to make the organizations believable, and then fit the characters in appropriately. That is, make G.I. Joe an elite counterterrorism task force comprised of members from a myriad of organizations, not a replacement for the country’s military branches. And for the sake of all that’s holy, don’t get carried away with each Joe’s garb; give them a standard outfit with some unique personalizations, but the harlequin thing just doesn’t work outside of the cartoon.

We haven’t seen any photos of Destro yet, but it already sounds like he won’t have any supernatural ties, which makes us a bit disappointed, but that kind of tangent would probably just complicate things anyway. Here’s hoping they don’t make the character lame compared to the original - we’d much rather see them not use Destro than screw him up.

Popularity: 4% [?]