They let the British critics see it, and the first two professional reviews were published here this morning. Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph called it a “joyless stinker” and Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times found it “stupefying”.
If anything, I suspect they’re being too kind. But then, I’m not the target audience for this movie any more than these two gents are. I don’t suppose anyone who’s considering going to see it would put much weight in critics’ opinions anyway - let alone British critics from the elitist quality press.
Here’s a link to the two reviews for anyone who does want to read them:
The reviews for Transformers weren’t that bad, at least not for the first one. If G. I. Joe is at least as decent as TF1, then I don’t think the studios would have been afraid to screen it for US critics.
Personally, I have no idea if it’s going to entertain its audience or not. I know nothing of the source material. Until the hype for this movie, I thought G.I Joe was a just one guy. I had a doll as a kid that called a “G. I. Joe,” who was just a kind of square-jawed, army guy dressed in cammies. The cartoons or comics or whatever this movie is based on don’t seem to have anything to do with that doll. It’s like some kind of team or something I guess. If the movie is at least successful at rendering the basic characters and look of the cartoon or whatever to the fans who like the source material, then it probaly won’ fail at the Box Office. I’m sure it will make money. Movies like this are critic proof.
The CHUD review gave it 8.5/10, pretty high praise and I thought the more nerdcore press would totally come down hard on it but they were pretty glowing about how good the movie was.
As a fan who liked the source material…from all I’ve seen, nope.
Christopher Eccleston, for what it’s worth, looks like he’s going a decent interpretation of one of the villains (A completely faithful version would basically have to be played by Ving Rhames, in an open-chested flight/leisure suit, wearing a skintight chrome face mask. And be dubbed by Sean Connery. (Figure A)).
As far as I can tell it’s a completely new canon different from both the ‘Real American Hero’ canon from my childhood or the Marvel comics canon of the past few years. My wife does some work for Hasbro on Transformers and that’s pretty much the scuttlebutt she hears on it.
Transformers 2 was infinitely better than the first one. So I hope that it’s no worse than 2 because if it’s as bad as 1 then whooboy.
