It’s tempt­ing to throw up one’s hands in despair that the brow level of source mate­r­ial for movies has dropped this pre­cip­i­tously low. To be fair, trash (escapist or just plain trashy trash) has existed since the very first days of the medium. But cinema’s early con­cep­tion as a the­atri­cal pre­sen­ta­tion made before a paid seated audi­ence asso­ci­ated it with plays, and many early nar­ra­tive silent film­mak­ers looked to plays and lit­er­a­ture for source material.

Over 100 years later, no amount of orig­i­nal mate­r­ial, adap­ta­tion of great works, or repeated remak­ing of other movies could be enough to feed movies’ hunger for story. It took almost 80 years for Hol­ly­wood to draw upon comic books for any­thing beyond cheap seri­als. The suc­cess of Richard Donner’s Super­man (1978) rever­ber­ated for years, lead­ing directly into other seri­ously bud­gets pres­tige pro­duc­tions as Tim Burton’s Bat­man (1989) and War­ren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990).

At the risk of sound­ing like a cur­mud­geon, some­thing has changed. Drunk on the pro­ceeds of a sec­ond wave of comics movies (par­tic­u­larly Bryan Singer’s X-Men and X2: X-Men United and Christo­pher Nolan’s Bat­man Begins and Bat­man: The Dark Knight), Hol­ly­wood burned hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on failed projects based on comics prop­er­ties that even many comics fans might not be ter­ri­bly famil­iar with, includ­ing Tank Girl (1995), Elek­tra (2005), and Jonah Hex (2010). With pop­u­lar comic books exhausted for now, Hol­ly­wood is quickly turn­ing to toys and even from board games (Peter Berg’s Bat­tle­ship and Rid­ley Scott’s Monop­oly are com­ing soon to a the­ater near you).

Nin­jas: The rea­son 10-somethings played with G.I. Joes and also the rea­son 30-somethings went to see this movie

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is based on the epony­mous line of plas­tic action fig­ures and acces­sories mar­keted to boys in the early 1980s by toy com­pany Has­bro. No doubt it was rushed into pro­duc­tion after the mas­sively lucra­tive suc­cess of Michael Bay’s two Trans­form­ers films, which were based on a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous toy line. The Rise of Cobra’s crit­i­cal recep­tion was all but assured as soon as it was announced; it was of course widely and justly panned. But I hap­pened to see it in quick suc­ces­sion with Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Fallen and X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine. In such com­pany, it is a mas­ter­piece, if for no other rea­son than its logic is inter­nally con­sis­tent (if stu­pidly implausible).

Although pos­sessed of a cer­tain degree of delib­er­ate camp not seen since Bur­ton and Beatty’s comics-based films, the movie seems bizarrely unaware of spoofs that came before it. Echo­ing the Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 theme song, a title card announces the story is set in the “Not too dis­tant future” — which, as any MST3K fan knows, promises lit­tle but cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity. The futur­is­tic set­tling weakly explains away the advanced weapons and trans­port tech­nol­ogy read­ily avail­able to G.I. Joe, an élite transna­tional mil­i­tary force with seem­ingly unlim­ited fund­ing, and its neme­sis Cobra, a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion enam­ored of tele­con­fer­enc­ing. Tra­di­tional bal­lis­tics are dep­re­cated in favor of cheesy laser blasters that pro­vide for lots of death, all of it blood­less. To be fair, this is rel­a­tively more real­is­tic than the comics and car­toons, where every shot sim­ply missed and nobody was maimed, dis­fig­ured, or killed despite a con­stant state of war. The other major head-slapping moment of cul­tural deaf­ness comes when a major action set piece is staged in Paris, as Cobra dis­in­te­grates the Eif­fel Tower. Does no one involved remem­ber Team Amer­ica: World Police?

Its struc­ture is a strange and con­fi­dent gam­ble; rather than start the story in the mid­dle, with its heroes and vil­lains estab­lished and locked in per­pet­ual bat­tle as in the source mate­r­ial, we start before Cobra even rises. The movie makes plain its inten­tions to set up a fran­chise, not even giv­ing birth to two of its most iconic char­ac­ters until the final moments.

Body armor works bet­ter if molded with faux breasts and six-packs

The entire movie is designed as one giant ori­gin story hob­bled with numer­ous flash­backs. First off, a pro­logue set in 1641 France fea­tures an ances­tor to Scot­tish weapons dealer James McCullen (Christo­pher Eccle­ston), with lit­tle ben­e­fit beyond pro­vid­ing a fram­ing device. Other flash­backs tell us more about the rivalry between duel­ing nin­jas Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun), and the rela­tion­ship between Duke (Chan­ning Tatum), The Baroness (Sienna Miller), and her brother The Doc­tor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, hilar­i­ously full of him­self in pro­mo­tional inter­views, cit­ing the art of kabuki as his inspi­ra­tion for act­ing much of the film behind a mask). The Baroness and The Doc­tor (not to be con­fused with Eccleston’s most famous role) are sib­lings, Duke dated The Baroness, and was once respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing the young Doc­tor. Got all that?

None of these tan­gled fam­ily ties fig­ure into the orig­i­nal mythos estab­lished in the 1980s comic books and ani­mated tele­vi­sion series, which existed in ser­vice of pro­mot­ing the toy line. The ancil­lary media pro­vided char­ac­ters and sce­nar­ios for play, all with the aim of inspir­ing kids to want to col­lect the whole set and stage epic bat­tles in their par­ents’ base­ments. The sto­ries pro­vided by mar­keters arguably reduced the ele­ment of imag­i­na­tion in children’s play. But looked at another way, the entire G.I. Joe pack­age could be seen as a large-scale mul­ti­me­dia act of world-building. Over time, the brand accu­mu­lated an epic story with a giant cast, and may have helped set the stage for later ambi­tious seri­al­ized pop­u­lar fic­tion of the 21^st cen­tury, like Lost.

The story ulti­mately cen­ters around Duke and his pal Rip­cord (Mar­lon Wayans), imply­ing the film­mak­ers failed to poll fans to find out what exactly it was they found appeal­ing about G.I. Joe as kids. Ask any­one who actu­ally read the comics, watched the car­toons, or played with the toys, and they will tell you Snake Eyes was always the most pop­u­lar char­ac­ter. His unre­quited love for the Joes’ sole female oper­a­tive Scar­lett and com­plex rela­tion­ship with “brother” Storm Shadow pro­vided most of the longest-running sto­ry­lines. Som­mers’ movie min­i­mizes the dis­fig­ured, mute ninja com­mando (despite the per­fect cast­ing of Park, famous as Darth Maul), and inex­plic­a­bly cos­tumed with a mask incor­po­rat­ing a mouth. Scarlett’s affec­tions are here trans­ferred to Rip­cord, and Storm Shadow is more overtly evil, whereas I recall his loy­al­ties being more inter­est­ingly ambigu­ous in the comics. His appar­ent death is an obvi­ous homage to Star Wars: The Phan­tom Men­ace, as is an under­wa­ter sub­ma­rine bat­tle lifted from any num­ber of other George Lucas space bat­tles. In the exact inverse to Storm Shadow, the purely vil­lain­ous Baroness is here trans­formed into a fixer-upper.

Mod­el­ling the lat­est in ter­ror­ist fetish­wear is Sienna Miller as The Baroness

One flaw the movie retained from the comics and car­toons: while each “Joe” has a dis­tinct code­name and per­son­al­ity, most of Cobra’s forces are name­less and face­less drones. Indeed, their stormtrooper brains have been sur­gi­cally mod­i­fied to turn them into obe­di­ent zom­bies. Some mea­ger drama is derived from The Baroness’ poten­tial reha­bil­i­ta­tion, but her vil­lainy is defused by mak­ing her another vic­tim of mind con­trol. Lead­ers Destro and Cobra Com­man­der are clas­sic exam­ples of the grotesque fig­ure in lit­er­a­ture — like Gol­lum and Richard III — where phys­i­cal defor­mity is an out­ward expres­sion of evil.

Fol­low­ing the overt racial car­i­ca­tures in Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Fallen, I feared the worst for Mar­lon Wayans as Rip­cord. Indeed, the trailer made a point of high­light­ing his clown­ing around. Sur­pris­ingly, one of the few areas in which the film man­aged to out­per­form expec­ta­tions was its treat­ment of its non-white char­ac­ters. Wayans was given the oppor­tu­nity to be often gen­uinely funny and not nearly as annoy­ing as I sus­pected he might have been. Rip­cord gets real chances to prove him­self, suc­ceeds, and even gets the girl in the end. Fur­ther prov­ing The Rise of Cobra’s bona fides as a sur­pris­ing source of affir­ma­tive action is seen in Saïd Tagh­maoui as the heroic Breaker, finally break­ing out of his ter­mi­nal stereo­typ­ing as a generic Mid­dle East­ern ter­ror­ist / enemy com­bat­ant (q.v. Three Kings, Van­tage Point, and Trai­tor). Now if we could just do some­thing about Cobra being made up of evil Brits, Scots, Japan­ese, and East­ern Europeans.

Why is The Dork Report cov­er­ing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra now? Well, the trailer for the sequel just dropped, and it’s very inter­est­ing. Whether out of bet­ter sto­ry­telling or tal­ent avail­abil­ity, the large cast of char­ac­ters appears to have been dras­ti­cally scaled back:

Offi­cial movie site: www.gijoemovie.com

Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.