Good lord. You're all on this "plant" stuff? AICN, Latino Review, Chud and IGN are run by hardcore "fanboys". They're not your typical film critics, and have never been.
Internet bloggers =/= real film critics. A.O. Scott, Ty Burr, Jim Emerson, Manohla Dargis, Roger Ebert, Joe Morgenstern, Christy Lemire, etc. are all real film critics.
Uh...ok. Did I say they weren't?
Which means they've seen films by Ophuls, Antonioni, Altman, Pasolini, Ozu, Tati, Fassbinder, Cassavettes, Fellini, Rossellini, etc. And thus have a wider breadth of knowledge and understanding of film than you. Which is basically a fact. Also, when you see *any* of the above critics review the film you should give it a read. You just might learn something.
So your point is that...they are professionals, and they've, as such, probably seen more movies than I have.
I see.
But this was not my point. I aem certain there are people who know more about film than I do, simply by virtue of having seen more, studied it, etc. I have never denied this, and it would be silly to do so.
But this is reflected in the dozens and dozens of general critics reviews how?
The reviews I'm reading give me no reason to believe the majority of these professional critics and bloggers have a "higher" sensibility of film based on THEIR OWN WORK. It leads me to believe they know how to use to a thesauraus, and to come up with lame "Joe" puns. I'v eknown a LOT of people who have seen films, and studied film, and studied writing, and guess what? I know people who haven't who can nontheless assess films and write circles around the people who are supposed to be experts on the subject matter.
See, a person can tell me that they studied at Julliard, and that they've been on Broadway, but until I see a decent performance from them, that means next to nothing to me in terms of their actual talent and ability.
Now then. Since you think I might learn something from one of the film critic masters...let's take a look at Ebert's review, shall we?
The film is inspired by Hasbro's famous line of plastic action figures. The heroes are no longer exclusively Americans, but a multi-national elite strike force from many nations, which provides Paramount the opportunity to give top billing to an actor named Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. And to think there was a time when Maurice Micklewhite was not considered a good name for a star.
So he states the obvious...ok...
And then, what's this? A knock and/or random comment about an African and his name? How devilishly clever! So much mature, intelligent assessment of film therein. Let's read on.
The Joes, as they are called, are needed to counter a secret nano-tech weapon which is a green liquid that eats up people and buildings and stuff. This weapon has been invented by the evil disfigured scientist named McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), who steals it back from the people he sold it to, and plans to use it to conquer the world. Why is McCullen so pissed off? His Scottish clan was insulted centuries ago. Those Scots.
So this far in, we obviously see that he thinks the source material is stupid. How is McCullen's grudge any lamer than any other terrorists issues over religion, land, etc? He's a megalomaniac, he has a unique grudge. This is bad because...
His conquest plans are not sophisticated. He launches four nano-missiles at world capitols. Two of them are Moscow and Washington. The third one is destroyed, and if I'm not mistaken the fourth one is forgotten by the plot and is still up there somewhere. But that's the kind of detail I tend to get wrong, because that's more fun that getting it right.
There are only three giant nano missles launched. One is blown up, the other two are chased down. It is clearly set up that there are three via both visuals and dialogue, and action. The man apparently barely paid attention to the movie.
No "film" knowledge being absorbed yet...let's read on.
How fast are these missiles? They rocket into space and zoom down to earth. A Joe named Duke (Channing Tatum) commandeers the enemy's rocket airplane and, even though he's never seen it before, flies it so well that he catches up to the Moscow missile and destroys it, and then he turns around and flies halfway around the globe to chase up with the missile headed for Washington. He uses verbal commands to fire his air-to-air weapons, after a fellow Joe named Scarlett (Rachel Nichols) intuits that McCullen would have programmed his plane to respond to Celtic, which, luckily, she happens to speak.
So he has a basic problem with one of the best, and, as the movie shows us, likely most intelligent people in the armed forces knowing Celtic, and making a logical decision.
K.
And he has a problem with superfast jets, and missles that don't hit their targets in a reasonable amount of time. Ok, that's a bit silly, I'll grant that.
No amazing assessment of film yet, however. Still waiting.
These plot details are not developed at great depth, because the movie is preoccupied with providing incomprehensible wall-to-wall computer-generated special effects. I should have been carrying a little clicker to keep count, but I believe that director Stephen Sommers has more explosions in his movie than Michael Bay had in "Transformers 2" only last month. World records don't last long these days.
Apparently he could not follow what was going on onscreen. Despite the fact that I suspect children could probably follow the action in this movie.
No amazing assessment of film yet. Still waiting.
What is Cobra? What nationality are its leaders, other than Scottish? What will it gain by destroying world capitols? Reader, I do not know. Even the U.S. President (Jonathan Pryce) asks incredulously, "Don't they have any demands?" His role is otherwise limited to being briefed about the Joes.
So, despite the fact that the movie is called RISE OF COBRA, and the fact that the end of the film has the main villain say, flat out, "It is time for The Cobra to rise", while the main villain dons a vaguely snakelike mask, he still can't figure out what "Cobra" refers to?
Really?
No amazing assessment of film yet, by the way. Still waiting.
Cobra has a woman named the Baroness (Sienna Miller) to match Scarlett of the Joes. These women are interesting. They have leather fetishwear and are seductively made up, but are otherwise honorary boys, because us Joe fans don't like to watch a lot of spit-swapping. But because us fans liked the two jive-talkin' robots in "Transformers," "G. I. Joe" gives us Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), who is comic relief, says black stuff, and can't control his high-tech armored suit, so he runs into things. We guess he's a contrast to the calm, macho heroism of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.
I'm sorry...Ripcord says "Black stuff?"
Am I reading that correctly?
So now Ebert, who has probably seen oh, hundreds of movies with a comic relief character, has a problem with comic relief characters?
The two teams also each have a skilled Ninja fighter from Japan. Why is this, you might ask? Because Japan is a huge market for CGI animation and videogames, that's why. It also has a sequence set in the Egyptian desert, although there are no shots of dead robots or topless pyramids. And Cobra headquarters are buried within the miles-deep ice of Arctic. You think construction costs are high here. At one point the ice cap is exploded real good so it will sink and crush the G. I. Joe's submarine. We thought ice floated in water but, no, you can see big falling ice chunks real good here. It must be only in your Coke that it floats.
More of "the source material is silly".
Except...what's that? He LOGICALLY assesses the nature of the ice that doesn't sink?
Is...is that an assessment of film?
Oh. No. Darn.
There is never any clear sense in the action of where anything is in relation to anything else. You get more of a binary action strategy. You see something, it fires. You see something else, it gets hit. Using the power of logic, you deduce that the first thing was aiming at the second thing.
This would tend to make him an idiot. It's pretty clear what is going on during the movie, and where things are.
Yet I say this movie is certainly better than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." How so? Admittedly, it doesn't have as much cleavage. But the high-tech hardware is more fun to look at than the transforming robots, the plot is as preposterous, and although the noise is just as loud, it's more the deep bass rumbles of explosions than the ear-piercing bang of steel robots pounding on each other.
Except that in fact, the movie has MORE cleavage than ROTF did, as it has Scarlett, The Baroness, and if we're counting, Cover Girl. So he can't even get THAT snide comment right.
I mentioned the lack of pyramids. We do, however, see the Eiffel Tower as it is eaten up by nano technology and topples over onto the Place la Condorde. Missiles also strike Mount Rushmore. No, wait! That was during one of the Coming Attractions!
What the hell is he talking about? We see the pyramids very clearly. Oh, he's making a TRANSFORMERS reference, because he apparently cannot separate the two movies.
Hmm. No amazing assessment of film, or assessment of this movie in that context, actually. He did try to be sarcastic, and I suppose in a backwards way one could assume what his issues with the film were, but...no. Sorry. This is nothing approaching a "good" review. It's lazy, and I would certainly expect better from Roger Ebert, who I usually rather like.
What lesson was I supposed to learn from this particular review? Is it "GI JOE as a basic concept is stupid"?
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