By Bob Clark
It’s almost peculiar to see just how much emotional investment there is paid to a franchise of cartoons, comics and now movies that have, for all intents and purposes, been based on a line of cheap action-figures from the 1980′s, but there you have it. To be sure there’s no shortage of big blockbusters for film and television that capitalize on the merchandizing potential of their stories and characters as a way of boosting sales– Star Wars, My Neighbor Totoro and Neon Genesis Evangelion might not’ve existed on public awareness if it weren’t for how “toyetic” they could become (the last one having heavily sexualized fetish-objects branded in its image that nearly wound up driving the series’ creator nuts). It’s not even terribly surprising nowadays to see the tail start wagging the dog and see the toys and merchandise be created before the multi-media franchising– in truth it’s something we’ve seen happen at least since the 80′s, with the Transformers line and other Japanese-imports. But there’s something even more bizarre with the myriad of creative turns that some franchises have taken over the decades, primarily for how they sometimes exceed the boundaries of mere generational nostalgia. What stands out about GI Joe, for instance, is just how seriously it can be taken.
By and large it would be easy to just look at the attention paid to the series of toys, comics and animated series as just the same kind of obsessive fan-behavior you see over and over again with any entertainment that manages to attract a devoted enough audience. But as with a lot of franchises that get ported out to any number of mediums, there’s so many versions of GI Joe that it would be easy to imagine the fanbase being divided to the point of balkanization. But there’s been just enough commonality between the disparate parts of the franchise and the differing narrative strands that they represent for something of a status-quo to develop over the years, with key parts rising in importance while others diminish– Snake Eyes waxes while Sergeant Slaughter wanes. For the most part this has meant that more attention has been paid to the Marvel line of comics that was commissioned for the toys when they first appeared in the 80′s, and less to the animated series that was loosely based on the stories and characters created for the comics. As new series and other franchise materials have piled up over the years, there’s been some attempt to merely take a lot of the outlandish characters and military scenarios and graft on a strained maturity to them, but a precious few have at least attempted to manage the same balance that was found in the comics, skirting between high concept adventure and high detail like a latter-day Bond film, yo-yoing between Ian Flemming’s dour original and the utter zaniness of the Roger Moore years.
In large part the success of this balance can be attributed to the long-standing relationship that writer Larry Hama has shared with the GI Joe series, coming on board back in the 80′s to help create the backstories for the different action-figure characters and serving to write and sometimes provide artwork for the comics for over a decade. What’s immediately apparent even after a few short glances at reprinted editions of the series is the sheer economy of visual storytelling, with physical action-sequences and panel lay-outs that sometimes come close to the flow and discipline that Frank Miller was exercising in the very same years with his Daredevil and Batman comics. Many will point to the issue Silent Interlude as a creative high-point of the series, and one that Hama would return to now and again when focusing on the fan-favorite ninja characters of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, their long-running feud told entirely through visuals. Anyone who’s read even some of the best-scripted American comics from the 80′s can attest to how atrociously over-written they can be– even a respected icon like Chris Claremont could get awfully wordy at the height of his X-Men days, with redundant text in captions and word-balloons needlessly crowding pages that were already clear enough from the artwork alone– and as such the fluidity and minimalism that’s present in Hama’s best moments shines, and makes some of the more hackneyed and simplistic good-and-evil showdowns easier to digest.
But even beyond that, there’s a nice shade of experience and humanity in Hama’s writing that’s present in the way that he portrays heroes and villains alike, taking the time to flesh out backstories for each of his major players that stress the environmental factors, from family tragedies to political and economic forces beyond their control, that played a role in guiding them. Being a Vietnam veteran, Hama’s attention to the psychological and emotional development of his military characters helps ground a series of stories and world-building that would have otherwise been blown wildly out of proportion thanks to the out-of-this-world hardware on display. And even though much of the storytelling boils down to the same kind of grand patriotic good-and-evil narrative that you could’ve found in a Reagan speech back then, with the villainous Cobra Command feeling particularly like a carry-all stand in for any and all of the roaming fears of vaguely defined terrorist forces of the 1980′s (especially vaguely defined in terms of differentiating them from so-called “freedom fighters”), it’s just as easy today to see a strangely knowing portrait of international evil being rendered, with all of the various action-figure characters being put to good use to illustrate the different types and embodiments of villainy-at-large. With the weapons-manufacturer Destro, conniving agent provocateur Baroness and the megalomaniac yet overwhelming personality of Cobra Commander (whose pathetically humble backstory today reads like something right out of the Tea Party), you have nearly all the elements of the military-industrial complex come to life, each with a plastic figurine to call their own.
That kind of subtle message wouldn’t be found anywhere in the Saturday-morning cartoon that was made in conjunction with the comics back in the 80′s, with a far more outlandish series of natural and supernatural elements crowding in with the nicely simplistic Joe/Cobra dynamic (I’ve never been able to remember, or be bothered enough to look up, whether Cobra-La was a parallel dimension, another planet, or whatever). But it somehow found its way into 2009′s GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, courtesy of director Stephen Sommers, and it’s to that film’s credit that it managed to capture at least a fraction of the same kind of bouyant energy and wit that was found in the best of Larry Hama’s comics, and mixed it with the sugar-rush chaos of the cartoon for spectacle and set-pieces as high and zippy as anything out of Star Wars or a myriad of Bond films, both of which the movie seemed to knowingly crib from (especially the scuba-battles of Thunderball, but we’ll forgive that). That movie focused primarily on the weapons-manufacturer Destro, played by Christopher Eccleston in a series of eye-brow raising career choices following his decision to bail from the rebooted Doctor Who just as it got going, and did an admirable job of building a nifty globe-trotting series of high-stakes adventure and action-packed set-pieces, juggling between the world domination plot of Cobra and the long-simmering ninja feud of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. It wasn’t great by any means, but there was something refreshing about it for the way that Sommers displayed that rare panache for envisioning and staging great big action-sequences while also keeping the camera still enough for you to see them happen
Gears have changed significantly for this overdue sequel, which was originally set to be released last year but was withdrawn at the last minute, supposedly to post-convert it to 3D, but more likely to shoot a handful of new scenes with Channing Tatum, perhaps one of the least likely up-and-coming movie-stars in recent history (or at the very least, one of the least expressive). Gone is director Sommers, replaced by John Chu, whose resume before now seems to consist entirely of feature-length dance routines and music videos. For the most part that skill-set translates alright to the action side of the film, with his conception and coverage of individual fights and large-scale set-pieces fairing a little better than the average of most modern spy or superhero capers– a centerpiece siege on a Himalayan dojo by Snake Eyes against a whole clan of zipline-rappelling ninjas stands out in particular as an isolated sequence inventive and economic enough to be worth watching when somebody decides to rip it onto YouTube, at least. For the most part, though, while Chu’s treatment of fights and shootouts is certainly feels more grounded than Sommers’ sometimes flighty and fantastic material, it lacks the same kind of high-concept ambition and scale that the previous movie had. With the exception of the ninja sequences, and the addition of GI Joe iconography to key landmarks, Retaliation as a distressingly rote feel to it– cut out Snake Eyes and Cobra, and you merely have yet another in a series of films where Bruce Willis and The Rock shoot at stuff with big-ass guns while trying to hold back from winking at the audience.
Between Chu’s equal parts frenetic and generic action and the script’s poor juggling of characters and MacGuffins (it’s hard to tell what Cobra’s actually up to until maybe the last ten minutes of the film) there’s precious few surface charms to the movie– Jonathan Pryce seems to be having a ball as a Cobra agent impersonating the President and gleefully leading the world into nuclear Armageddon, and Ray Stevenson and other big-and-tall character actors at least get something to do. If you want something that matches the heart and occasional insight of Larry Hama’s original comics and marries it with a 21st century brand of military-action, you’re better off going to a friend’s house and watching them play Metal Gear Solid. Or better yet, drive swing by a yard sale in the suburbs and see if anybody’s selling their old GI Joe action figures, and come up with your own little adventure. That’s what they’re made for, anyway.
