I'd like to begin by saying that I am a tremendous fan of the original Jem and the Holograms cartoon. It's a delightful hunk of 80's cheese that's as catchy and charming as it is oddly compelling; more than half the episodes involve something ridiculous, like time travel or a sabotaged movie set, only for something utterly mundane (like a lawsuit or labor unions) to save the day in the end. When I heard that a film adaptation was in the works, I couldn't wait. Not because I expected anything good, mind, but because I anticipated something that would be a catastrophic failure. Something that would not only completely miss the point of the source material, but would also provide endless comic fodder for me to pick apart and heckle as I watched. And good lord was I ever not disappointed.
The plot focuses on young orphan, Jerrica Benton (Aubrey Peeples); together with her foster sisters (Stefanie Scott, Aurora Perrineau, and Hayley Kiyoko), she forms the titular band and rockets to super-stardom after a video of Jerrica singing (incognito as "Jem", to combat stage fright) goes viral on YouTube. The girls are swept up by record producer Erica Raymond (a man in the original cartoon, here portrayed by Juliette Lewis) and flung into a world of glamour, glitter, fashion, and fame. It's your standard "kids get famous, drama ensues, everyone eventually forgives one another" story that's been told a million times before, only stretched out to fill two hours. Whenever the film isn't focusing on all that well-trodden ground, it diverts to a subplot involving a robot built by Jerrica's father, Synergy. In the cartoon, Synergy was a supercomputer capable of projecting holograms onto the band to alter their appearance (hence the name of the show). Here, Synergy (spelled "S1N3RGY", because of course Hollywood would make a change as stupid and pointless as that) is a diminutive cross between Gizmo-Duck and a Weeble that communicates through beat-boxing and leads the girls on a treasure hunt. Spoiler alert, the treasure is an encouraging message from Jerrica's father that she basically already recieved (and didn't particularly need), making this subplot entirely pointless.
"Entirely pointless" is really the phrase of the day with this film; so little of the plot actually matters. It's two hours long, yet there's hardly any conflict to speak of. The band needs to uncover the secret of Synergy and find out what Emmett Benton wanted to tell his daughters. So they do, without any major problems. They need to break into a heavily guarded building (despite the fact that they all work in this building and therefore would have a perfect excuse to get past security). Although unnecessary, the break-in is successful and they escape without a hitch. The band breaks up after Jerrica decides to sign a solo contract in an attempt to save their adoptive aunt's house. She saves the house, has a little cry about it, and the band is back together about five minutes later. It's baffling to me how the filmmakers could take a cartoon with so much action and imagination and water it down into the blandest product possible. The best scene in the entire movie takes place after the credits have rolled, and it's only because that's the only time in the entire film that the tone begins to get anywhere near as absurd as that of the source material.
I would be remiss if I didn't call attention to this film's blatant use of viral videos. In order to update the story of Jem for the modern era, the band rises to prominence after a YouTube video goes viral, netting them overnight stardom. In keeping with this theme, the filmmakers attempt to integrate YouTube videos of aspiring musicians into the film in the sloppiest way possible. Instead of having an actual soundtrack, the film will occasionally stop, cut to a low-res YouTube video, then cut back to the film. It does this constantly and it's exactly as jarring as it sounds. I'm not sure if I've ever felt direct contempt for a film's aesthetic before, but Jem and the Holograms certainly managed to pull it off.
You'd expect that a movie about a rock band (based off of a cartoon that had at least two unique, original songs per episode) would be positively lousy with catchy tunes. Instead, I'm not entirely certain this film has an actual soundtrack; it's all lackluster, distractingly out of place viral videos of indie kids drumming on garbage bins or something similarly trendy and unique. There's three concert sequences, each featuring a song that sounds like a bland, generic pop hit from today, rather than the wild 80's glam-rock that the Jem name suggests. It would have been so easy for this film to earn brownie points by giving us a cover of the classic theme song (or even a few of the songs from the actual show), but we couldn't even get that. It just feels like a soulless, cheap production through and through. Travel transitions are done through Google Maps (with copyrights and watermarks clearly visible at all times), montages are littered with unrelated stock footage sloppily edited to make sense in context, and it makes liberal use of YouTube videos of people gushing about the Jem cartoon (which doesn't make a lick of sense, considering the cartoon has a completely different look and logo than the in-film band), but I digress.
Usually, with a movie like this, I would offer some kind words like "at least it looked like they were having fun" or "they did the best with what they had", but I can't think of anything nice to say here. To be totally fair, no one really gives a bad performance, but the writing is bland, the story is contrived and needlessly complicated, and the entire aesthetic of this film is cheap, sloppy, and effortless. When one looks at the mega-bucks Hasbro pumps into their various other franchises and compares it to Jem and the Holograms' measly five-million dollar budget, it's clear that the studio had no faith in their product from the get-go. And this is a studio that continually allows Michael Bay to make Transformers films. Jem and the Holograms, sadly, is a film for no one. It's too different and spiritless for Jem fans while conversely being too cheap and derivative of other films (like Pitch Perfect) for everyone else. That said, I hope and pray in vain that this gets a sequel, if only to expand upon the fantastic mid-credits scene. This lone, short sequence represents everything that the rest of the film should have been; the absolute worst thing about Jem and the Holograms is that its dismal box office earnings thus far have all but guaranteed that we won't get to see more of what was teased once the credits rolled. Truly, truly, truly disappointing.
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