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The earliest G.I. Joe reviews are out, and they're chock full of spoilers. Plus there are tons of FlashForward and Lost casting reports. And spoilers for Gamer and Harry Potter. When it comes to spoilers, knowing is half the battle!
G.I. Joe:
There are a bunch of early test-screening reviews of this film, and they're all quite glowing, except for one. The one damning review is also the most detailed and spoilery — so that may be why some of these details seem a bit negative.
Anyway, the film starts in France in 1641, when a guy with a fake Scottish accent is forced to wear a mask when it's still piping hot. Then we jump forward to the "not too distant future." We meet James McCullen, who sells warheads full of green goop to NATO, and they're guarded by Duke, Ripcord and some cannon fodder. They get ambushed, and the cannon fodder all die. The Baroness grabs the warheads, but Duke can't shoot her because they have history together. Instead, he just chases after her shouting her name over and over.
Then the Joes turn up, and save the day. Except Heavy Duty stops shooting at the Baroness and says, "Don't make me shoot a lady." She gets away, but without the warheads. Then General Hawk appears via hologram, and tells Duke and Ripcord to come to GI Joe headquarters in Egypt, under the sand. The base has hundreds of extras wandering around doing Joe-stuff. Ten nations are joined together to make one G.I. Joe unit, sharing intel. Then McCullen appears via hologram and accuses Duke of not doing his job. Duke wants to punch the hologram, but Ripcord holds him back. General Hawk gets to say "Knowing is half the battle."
Duke wants to join the team, but Hawk says no. So Duke changes Hawk's mind by sharing everything he knows about the Baroness, cueing a huge flashback in which we see him propose to her and agree to protect her egghead brother Rex when they go off to war together. In the flashback, Ripcord tells Duke and the Baroness, "You two look like the little white couple on the cake." After Rex gets blown up and is presumed dead, Duke shows up at Rex's funeral on a motorcycle, wearing sunglasses in the rain. Duke and the Baroness just randomly stop talking to each other. But shockingly it turns out Rex is actually the Doctor, and he's injected his sister with nanomites that mean he can control her like a robot.
Duke and Rip get tested as possible Joe recruits, and Rip hits on Scarlett. Snake Eyes beats on Duke a lot, but then Duke jumps Snake Eyes from behind after the match is over, and everyone's impressed, because nobody's ever been able to hit Snake Eyes before. Duke has another opportunity to shoot the Baroness during the bad guys' raid on the Joes' HQ, and he can't do it. Storm Shadow steals a jetpack from the Joes' base.
The flashback involving Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes shows them beating the crap out of each other as kids, and it's totally solid. Later, we see how the young Storm Shadow killed their master for favoring Snake Eyes.
Zartan isn't really a master of disguise, "just a guy who will trade clothes with you after he kills you." We see Rex/The Doctor injecting Zartan with chemicals to let him change his actual appearance, interspersed with shots of the U.S. president. What can they be planning?
After the baddies destroy the Eiffel Tower, they also capture Duke. And the good guys get nabbed by the French police. They have to promise never to return to France again before they can get released. They figure out McCullen is in the North Pole, where the Baroness still manages to show off her cleavage. Everyone else wears jeans and light jackets at the North Pole.
The Doctor reveals that he's actually the Baroness' presumed-dead brother, and he prepares to turn Duke into a nano-controlled slave. The Baroness breaks free of her mind-control and tries to save Duke, but gets knocked out. McCullen asks Duke which he'd rather do: stop the bad guys, or save the Baroness. Duke says both. Something blows up, and McCullen's face gets burned off.
The nanotech missiles blast off, and Snake Eyes shoots down one of them. The others are headed for Moscow and Washington. Ripcord flies a fighter jet he's never even seen before, with an encouraging kiss from Scarlett. The plane's controls are all voice-activated and in Celtic, so he has to learn how to say "Fire" in Celtic.
Meanwhile, the U.S. President has been taken to a secure bunker, but one Secret Service agent turns out to be under the Doctor's control, and he shoots all the other Secret Service agents. Zartan shows up, apparently looking like the President, who says "So that's your plan!"
The Doctor and McCullen escape in a sub, and Duke and the Baroness (who's now at least temporarily cured of being evil and nano-controlled) follow. The Doctor injects McCullen with some nano-goop, which turns his burned face into super-hard metal, and the Doctor tells McCullen he'll be called Destro from now on. And Destro can refer to the Doctor as "Commander" from here on out. Once he becomes Cobra Commander, he's sort of Darth Vader-esque.
Duke confronts Cobra Commander underwater and says he'll take him in. "You and what army?" Cobra Commander says. All the other Joes pop up behind Duke. "This one," he says. Ripcord destroys the last missile and parachutes onto the White House lawn, where he's under suspicion until he shouts "Same team! Same team!" We end with Destro and Cobra Commander locked up. The Baroness is in prison too, but she gets conjugal visits from Duke while they work on getting the nanomites out of her body. The U.S. President is welcomed back to the Oval Office, but he whistles and puts his feet up, revealing it's really Zartan. D00d! [AICN and Latino Review and <a href="Collider">Collider and ComicBookMovie]
Harry Potter:
The last two films will be called Deathly Hallows part 1 and 2, says Daniel Radcliffe. [MTV]
Gamer:
Gerard Butler says Gamer doesn't let up for a minute, and the intense pace is "what you'd expect if you lived in that world." And he explains the storyline a bit:
Kable is actually in a prison, where they've instituted this new game, where pretty much nobody survives. And within the parameters of the game we are controlled by the gamers. This is watched globally. So I'm trapped in that and, meanwhile, trying to make my way through the game without being killed and, at the same time, down the system so that I can get back to the family I have.
Lost:
Someone talked to producer/director Jack Bender, who said it's deliberate that the scene when our heroes meet Ben at the Marina has different dialogue when the scene is shown from different perspectives, and there's a reason for that. Also, he calls the series ending "thrilling and satisfying," and reiterates that season six will re-focus on the core world of the series.
Separately, a casting director claims the show is trying to line up availability for all of the departed cast members, including Cynthia Watros,Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Clancy Brown, Daniel Roebuck, Mira Furlan, Andrew Divoff, M.C. Gainey, Brett Cullen, and Bill Mapother. And Dominic Monaghan, Maggie Grace, Ian Sommerhalder, Elizabeth Mitchell, Michell Rodriquez, Harold Perrineau and Rebecca Mader could be back for multiple episodes. But nobody's signed up yet, even if this rumor is true. [The ODI]
FlashForward:
Sources are claiming that Dominic Monaghan has definitely joined this show's cast as of episode three, playing a character named Theo starting with the second episode. [BuddyTV]
And here are logos for this series and V. [SpoilerTV]
There's a casting call for episode three, including a lot of characters. Attaf is a nine-year-old African American boy who experiences family upheaval in the wake of the "flash forward," and he could be a recurring character. We'll also meet Attaf's mother, but she won't actually speak.
There's also a brace of Germans. Rudolf is an octogenarian German, who uses a cane to get around and is a manipulative old sod. He gets into a challenging situation and has to talk his way out of it. Stefan is a fortysomething German American who helps with interviewing a witness. Helmut is a fiftysomething German attorney who negotiates a deal for a client. And then there's Schultz, an avuncular fortysomething German who's "content with the status quo."
Another attorney we meet in the episode is Zoey, a thirtysomething defense attorney who's probably African American. She has a sharp sense of style and a finely honed intellect. We also meet Felicia, an African American friend of Olivias, who's in her forties and both beautiful and intelligent.
We meet two bartenders at a local watering hole, the pretty but frayed-around-the-edges Kate and another nameless male bartender who informs her of a shift change. There's also Ann, a pretty but opportunistic Asian woman who gets into jams with her short fuse, and has irritable bowel syndrome. A strange man approaches Ann in the ladies' room. And Jerome, an overweight slacker who dances in his underwear, Risky Business-style.
Finally, there's Tomasi, an emotionally unstable pessimist; John, a nervous businessman; Sarah, who's quick-witted and engaging even when she's ordering a sandwich; and Joel, a DMV employee who's happy to take a bribe. [SpoilerTV]
Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.
Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.
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