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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

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Released 2-Dec-2009

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Action Main Menu Audio & Animation
Featurette-Making Of
Featurette-Effects
Audio Commentary
Rating Rated M
Year Of Production 2009
Running Time 113:13
RSDL / Flipper RSDL (00:00) Cast & Crew
Start Up Ads Then Menu
Region Coding 4 Directed By Stephen Sommers
Studio
Distributor

Paramount Home Entertainment
Starring Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Christopher Eccleston
Grégory Fitoussi
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Leo Howard
Karolina Kurkova
Byung-hun Lee
Case Amaray-Opaque
RPI ? Music Alan Silvestri


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
English Descriptive Audio Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 2.40:1
16x9 Enhancement
16x9 Enhanced
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 2.40:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles English
English Audio Commentary
Smoking No
Annoying Product Placement Yes
Action In or After Credits No

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    Based on the 1980s "Real American Hero" line of GI Joe toys, albeit re-purposed into being an international group of soldier-types (to make it a little easier to sell around the world), G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a big-budget action flick from The Mummy and Van Helsing director Stephen Sommers.

    The action kicks off when US Soldiers Duke (Channing Tatum) and his best mate Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are given the task of escorting a top-secret nanomite weapon (warheads full of microscopic green robots that eat metal) to a secret facility. The pair and their team are ambushed by a group of baddies led by The Baroness, who used to be Duke's fiance until her brother (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was killed on a mission supervised by Duke, who are acting on the orders of James McCullen (Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston), the head of MARS - the very company that sold the weapons to the US Government. A group of goodies, including Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Snake Eyes (Ray Park), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui), come and save the day. Those Goodies belong to an international secret army of goodies called GI Joe, who are led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) - coincidentally, the person the weapons were meant to go to in the first place.

    Duke and Ripcord join the Joes, but not long after their montage of physical tests to do so, two more baddies sent by MARS, along with an army of super-soldiers possessed by nanomites to retrieve the green warhead thingies. This time the lead baddies are Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee, continuing the "bad" typecast he started in the magnificent The Good, The Bad and The Weird), who is the nemesis of Snake Eyes after he bloodily murdered the sensei that trained them both (around the time he looked ten years old), and Zartan (Arnold Vosloo), who only really seems to be present to set up a sequel. Lots of explosions ensue. Then some battling in Paris where we get to see what these Nanomites can really do and they have these super armour suits that make people run really quickly and shoot a lot. Then there is some more battling at an evil underwater base under the polar ice cap and a super-jet chasing missiles.

    Confused yet? G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is an incredibly silly movie (surely the fact that these characters only seem to have ridiculous names gives that away), but it is the type of crap movie that can be enjoyable if you check your brain at the door - and I mean all of your brain, even the parts that remember that ice floats and realise that submarines physically can't whizz around like a squadron of X-Wing fighters in a galaxy far, far away while firing machine guns.

    Most of the film's problems seem to stem from too many cooks being in the kitchen. Half of the roll call of screenwriters seem to have pitched the script at adults who grew up with the GI Joe universe in the 1980s, the other half pitched it at today's kids. The result is an erratic tone that wavers between Rambo and Alvin and The Chipmunks. Somewhere in the mess is a halfway decent blockbuster story, but every time it begins to emerge an embarrassing clump of "comic relief" hides it again. Witness one such gem, used to unnecessarily pad the introduction of an assorted action scene:

    Character A: Thousand's of miles across and ten stories thick, locating McCullen's base will be like finding a needle in a coalmine.

    Character B: Haystack.

    Character A: Oh, right a haystack in a coalmine.

    The film generally works best when it is moving so quickly that you don't have time to think about it and they don't have time to play for "laughs". Thankfully that's most of the film's runtime.

    The effects vary significantly from being quite good (the Eiffel Tower being collapsed by nanomites) to pretty awful (particularly a horribly over-long over-CGI'd car chase), though on the whole make for adequate blockbuster spectacle. The bigger the screen, the better.

    The cast is far better than this sort of film deserves, even though most of them are phoning it in. On top of those already mentioned, there are also Brendan Fraser, Jonathan Pryce and Kevin J. O'Connor in small roles. None of the characters have any more depth than you would expect on the back of the box their action figure came in, but each actor has a decent enough screen presence to pull off their respective caricature.

    An utter mess that still manages to be big, dumb fun. Don't expect anything more.

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Transfer Quality

Video

    The film is presented in its original 2.40:1 aspect and is 16x9 enhanced.

    The image is clear and reasonably sharp. The colours are bold, though skin tones a little on the pink side. There is a good degree of detail in dark areas and blacks, which is a blessing given the number of characters in black uniforms.

    Mild pixelation is present in some of the backgrounds, although not enough to bother most viewers. There is no sign of film artefacts or distracting video nasties.

    English subtitles are available for the film. Based on the portion sampled they appear to be accurate and reasonably well timed.

Video Ratings Summary
Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The film features an English 5.1 Dolby Digital (448Kbps) audio track and English Descriptive Audio 2.0 Dolby Digital (224Kbps) audio track.

    The audio is crisp and clear. The dialogue is easy to make out (although enough of it is gibberish that you could be forgiven for not understanding it all!), but is a little quiet in the mix and is occasionally overpowered by explosions and the like. The audio is in good sync to the video.

    Like the movie itself, the film's use of the surround speakers and subwoofer is big and dumb. There is no degree of subtlety to the soundscape, which makes for an exciting mix but one that lacks clarity and precision.

Audio Ratings Summary
Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Extras

Audio Commentary

    Director Stephen Sommers and producer Bob Ducsay present an excited commentary that explains how awesome everything was even though the whole movie was rushed out the door like a movie-equivalent of a Pizza Hut delivery. Worth a laugh if you can appreciate how full of it the pair are as they acclaim some of the stupidest parts of the movie as its highlights (although the "making of" would achieve the same effect in much less time), avoid like the plague otherwise.

The Big Bang Theory: The Making of GI Joe Featurette

    A 30 minute "making of" featurette that has enough interesting bits to overcome its advertorial tone. Cynics and bad-movie lovers will particularly get a kick out of director Stephen Somers explanation of how the movie "came together so quickly" and they started shooting before they'd even worked out the full story and script. Congratulations seem due to the editor for pulling something remotely coherent from this haphazard approach to filmmaking!

Next Gen Action: The Amazing Visual FX and Design of GI Joe Featurette

    A decent, 20-odd minute long, effects and production design featurette, although like the "making of" it suffers from an unnecessary advertorial tone and there is an awful lot of repeat footage between this and the other featurette. It features plenty of comparisons between shots at various stages of effecting, although it may have been a bit more interesting if the effects themselves were a little less conventional.

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    The Region 4 edition is identical to the Region 1 edition save for PAL/NTSC differences.

Summary

    An utter mess that still manages to be big, dumb fun (which at least ranks GI Joe miles ahead of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen).

    The audio and video are decent, without being spectacular. The extras are numerous and worthwhile.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Adam Gould (Totally Biolicious!)
Friday, December 18, 2009
Review Equipment
DVDSony Playstation 3, using HDMI output
Display Samsung 116cm LA46M81BD. Calibrated with THX Optimizer. This display device is 16x9 capable. This display device has a maximum native resolution of 576i (PAL).
Audio DecoderPioneer VSX2016AVS. Calibrated with Video Essentials/Digital Video Essentials.
AmplificationPioneer VSX2016AVS
Speakers150W DTX front speakers, 100W centre and 4 surround/rear speakers, 12 inch PSB Image 6i powered sub

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