G.I. Joe Invades Paris

 

AintItCoolNews has a piece up discussing some of the upcoming films from Paramount including G.I. Joe, Star Trek and the Watchmen.  Yeah, I know, I was suprised by the Watchmen being included in there too.  It's a  WB film, but apparently Paramount is handling the internationl release for the film.

 

Anyways, some new footage of the G.I. Joe movie was shown, and it's shaping up to be like pretty much how I predicted it to be.

 

GI Joe – we saw a number of unfinished scenes including introductions to Duke, The Baroness and Snake Eyes. We also saw a computer generating scene which acted as a story board for the eventual filming. There was a scene where the baroness comes home to France and we got to see the mansion, another scene where a member of GI Joe is captured by COBRA, Chris Eccleston and Arnold Voslo both look on form. Finally we saw a scene which involves a MASSIVE car chase and the eventually toppling of the Eiffel Tower. The film itself look like typical Steven Sommers schtik, massively enjoyable, Sienna Miller looks amazing but I do not think it will fare well with critics, action is very stylised from the scenes I saw, the character development is terrible, Marlon Wayans in particular looked bad!!

 

Giant, super cool looking action scenes? Check.  Totally crappy plot and crappy characterizations?  Check.

 

Sure, having the Eiffel Tower get knocked down in a giant fight scene between G.I. Joe and Cobra is a badass idea.  But having cool fights means nothing if the audience doesn't care about the characters involved in the fight.  True tension comes from worrying about characters you like in dangerous situations where they could conceibably get killed.  It doesn't come from big ass explosions.  Why the hell they would cast a Wayans brother as a member of the Joe team is beyond me.  At least they said Destro and Zartan look to be "on form", but then again I'd expect that from a great actor like Christopher Eccleston.

 

If you'd like to read about what was shown for Star Trek and Watchmen, click on the above link to Ain't It Cool News.  It wasn't much more than what we've already seen already.  Although we did learn that Star Trek will be the film that will have the full trailer for Transformers 2 run before it.