News Flash: GI Joe Retaliation is Crap

News Flash: GI Joe Discovers Nuclear Weapons in Israel

by Peter Lee - China Hand

The movie GI Joe: Retaliation is crap. To call it a video game movie is an insult to good video games. It is a bad video game movie.

The expository scenes—where the characters move their mouths and words come out—are treated as cut scenes i.e. brief pauses to reward players with a bathroom break after they have completed a previous level, and provide the arbitrary framing that enables another session of witless, button-mashing mayhem on the next level.

Fans of common sense, physics, and conservation of momentum will be amused and/or appalled by the revelation—spoiler alert!—that Cobra’s super weapon is a gravity bomb…released from an orbiting satellite.

The audience’s primary diversion during and after the film is ridiculing the logical inconsistencies and plot holes in the movie—and noting the numerous missed opportunities for comic relief (obviously, the dubious determination was made that action, no matter how absurd, sells and character and comedy do not play in the critical foreign markets). The possibilities are virtually limitless.

However, GI Joe: Retaliation does perform one remarkable geopolitical service. It treats the existence of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal as a matter of fact.

When the world’s nuclear weapons powers are gathered for an asinine episode of Armageddon brinksmanship orchestrated by Cobra, the attendees are: USA, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, India, North Korea…and Israel (in the first act of the movie, Pakistan was deemed unworthy of retaining its nuclear weapons and was summarily disarmed by the GI Joe team, thereby forfeiting its place at the atomic roundtable).

I wonder how this plot point snuck into the movie. Perhaps the producers believe they will lock in the lucrative Iranian market with the admission that Israel is, indeed, a covert nuclear weapons power.

In any case, it was interesting to see.

Pretty much the only interesting thing in GI Joe: Retaliation.