G.I. Joe Review

Last weekend the family and I went to the Kingston Firehouse theater and saw the new G.I. Joe movie. First, I'd like to talk about the theater experience.

The firehouse is actually just that, it used to be the location of the headquarters of Kitsap Fire and Rescue that served the Kingston Community for many years. Now rebuilt, it is the newest building in Kingston. It has a video store, movie theater, and breakfast cafe all in one. It has two screens, the 'Main Stage', a 140 seat large screen and and the 'Back Stage' a smaller, 48 seat stage. The family and I went to see Transformers 2 on the smaller screen, and honestly, the experience wasn't really worth it. The screen is a little bigger than my big screen. It isn't really the theater that you want to experience a 'popcorn' movie like Transformers on.

That being said, the Main Stage is quite nice, and the moviegoing experience is a quite unlike what you may be used to. Before the show Craig Smith, the operator of the Theater, came out to chat with everybody who came out. He talked about the movie, and the upcoming films coming to the theater. You could tell that this guy was a movie buff from the second he opened his mouth, and his little presentation definitely gave a different 'small town/community' feel to going to the movies. A little different, but I liked it.

I can definitely see going to this theater to see movies that are a little less "mainstream" than something like G.I. Joe. My wife and I are both huge movie buffs ourselves, and we are always out to support community efforts like this. I will definitely be back.

Anyway, enough about the Theater... I'm going to review G.I. Joe now, and it probably won't be the review anybody expected, but let me start with the summary:

It lived up to my expectations.

For better or for worse, the movie is what it is. If you went to go watch this movie, you weren't expecting a genius cinematic masterpiece with a great plot and story. You were expecting a cartoon-y movie designed to sell action figures in which a lot of stuff blows up. And whatever you might think of the genre as a whole, this movie delivers on what it is expected to.

The plot is just about what you'd expect. Some weapon salesman multinational corporate dude who just so happens to be a bad guy (Shocking!) invents a weapon that through "nano-technology" has billions of tiny green robots that eat through anything and will keep going until the world is destroyed or until you push a button and all the tiny little robots stop eating and disappear. Or something.

In reality of course, the little robots could 'eat', but the stuff they eat would have to actually...you know...go somewhere. Not disappear as soon as it is eaten. But this is the movies I guess, so I can only guess that the little robots have inter-dimensional portals as mouths and they are transporting the matter that they eat to another parallel universe.

What if some of these magical "eating" nano-robots were out of range of the signal and didn't get the message to stop eating? Ever drop a call on your cell phone? How about a dropped call that wipes out human existence? What if the antennae on the nano-robot gets accidentally 'eaten' by another nano-robot or otherwise damaged and it has no way to receive the signal from the remote control device? Can you hear me now? NO, BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD!

But, lets not let a little scientific impossibility stop our good time, plenty of time for that later. Our heroes Duke and some dude (yeah, I don't remember his name, but honestly...does it even matter?) are assigned to transport the little warheads of scientific impossibility to some other location via HumVee convoy or something and they get ambushed by the bad guys. But, surprise! An elite super-force of good guys come to save the day, and our heroes are recruited to join the good guys and due to the fact that they happen to be there, they are recruited to join the good guy super-force.

Campy training montage follows, then the bad guys attack, steal the weapons, the good guys track them down to a major city that hasn't been blown up this year by Hollywood (took some hunting). The bad guys succeed in destroying a major landmark that didn't look at ALL like CGI...not one bit. And then the good guys chase them down to some exotic arctic locale and save the bad guys from blowing up major cities and eventually (spoiler alert!) the good guys win. Odd, in a movie like this I did not see that coming.

Anyway, like I said above...G.I. Joe is everything I expected it to be. And of course, the kiddos loved it.