Jem and the Holograms (2015)
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 A film that's anything BUT glamour, glitter, fashion, & fame. And not even Hasbro is safe from stinkers like this...
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Jem and the Holograms is a 2015 American musical fantasy drama film starring Aubrey Peeples as the title character, Stefanie Scott, Hayley Kiyoko, Aurora Perrineau, Juliette Lewis, Ryan Guzman, and Molly Ringwald.
Loosely based on the 1985-88 animated television series Jem by Christy Marx, the film is produced by Hasbro Studios and Blumhouse Productions, co-produced and directed by Jon M. Chu, and written by Ryan Landels. Chu had been interested in working on the film as he grew up watching the original animated Jem series with his sisters and became a fan of it as a result.
Plot
Teenage songwriter Jerrica Benton and her younger sister Kimber live with their Aunt Bailey and two foster sisters, Aja and Shana. Jerrica learns that their house will be auctioned and vents her emotions by recording a song using Kimber's video camera to post blogs. Still, she uses a disguise, calling herself Jem, a nickname given to her by her deceased father.
She accidentally forgets to delete the video, and Kimber posts it on YouTube, garnering millions of views in a single day. Next, Jerrica and her sisters travel to Los Angeles because Jerrica earns a record deal with Starlight Productions, meeting producer Erica Raymond and her son Rio. In the process, they come across a small robot called Synergy built by the Benton sisters' deceased father, Emmett, which leads them on a scavenger hunt where each clue represents something Jerrica wanted to do with her father.
On the way, Rio and Jerrica develop feelings, much to Erica's dismay, who signs Rio off to another singer. Aunt Bailey tells Jerrica via FaceTime that their house is going for auction in a few days, and Jerrica asks for an advance. Erica happily obliges, but she says that she wants Jerrica to leave her sisters and start a solo contract. Jerrica signs, thinking that she is doing it for the family. However, her sisters soon find out about the contract and leave. Jerrica visits the house in Los Angeles she used to live in with Kimber and her father.
Her sisters end up coming back to finish the scavenger hunt with her, and Rio also comes along. Jerrica soon realizes that the last piece is the earrings that her dad told her to wear, but Erica told her to take them off when she first went to Starlight. Rio and the girls break into Starlight, almost getting caught by Erica, but they succeed. The reward for finishing the hunt is a final hologram message video from Jerrica and Kimber's father (in which he tells how much he loves Jerrica, but strangely not her sister Kimber). At the end of the movie, Rio and Jem kiss, Erica is fired, the house is safe, and everyone is happy.
In a mid-credits scene, Erica arrives in a seedy junkyard, where she attempts to recruit a group of punkish young women into a band to rival the Holograms. Initially, they decline, but when the leader, Pizzazz, overhears that Rio is dating Jem, they agree and take Erica inside. The graffiti on the side of their trailer reveals that they're the Misfits.
Why It's Truly Outrageous (in a Bad Way)
- The movie could be considered one of, if not, the least faithful adaptation of a cartoon in film history, seeing it has a very, very poor grasp of the source material:
- In the show, Jem's alter ego was Jerrica, and she used earrings to transform into her true self and alter ego.
- The main characters are portrayed as teenage girls in the film, but they're young women in the show.
- Synergy in the movie is a small robot that's a blatant ripoff of R2-D2, while in the TV show, it's a giant super-computer.
- There are no Misfits in the movie, except in the mid-credits scene, which is nothing more than sequel baiting for a follow-up to the eventually canceled film (see Trivia).
- Eric Raymond is male in the show, but in the film, Eric Raymond is a woman named Erica Raymond, making absolutely no sense.
- Overall, the film doesn't feel like a loving homage to the original series, but rather a giant middle finger to those who enjoyed the original.
- Racebending akimbo. Jetta has gone from British to Mexican-American, Roxy has gone from Italian-American to Korean-American, and Rio, who is Brazilian-American, has been whitewashed.
- The songs are nothing more than generic mass-produced pop music, and it's dreadful. While the music in the cartoon wasn't always great either, they at least put some EFFORT into it, and they only put in at least a song or two in each episode. For the movie's soundtrack, there are six songs. Only Young Blood is good; the rest of them are not.
- Most of the film is covered up with YouTube videos of people playing instruments, one of those people being Rob Scallon for some reason.
- The film creators had a supposed contest where if fans of the original spoke of what they liked about the original Jem cartoon on YouTube, they would have a part in the movie. However, rather than follow through with the contest, the film creators edited the YouTube videos so that it sounded like they were praising the movie instead of the show. This is also laughably lazy, as not only is the merchandise the fans are wearing coming from the show but there's a scene where you can see the show playing in the background. To quote Doug Walker/Nostalgia Critic on this one, "That is low."
- An awful generic plot about teenagers becoming pop stars, and it's a story that you've heard a million times before in other much better movies.
- There is blatant product placement in the form of YouTube and Google Earth, which are owned both by Google). For map transitions, the film uses Google Earth. You can even actually find the logo at the bottom right of the screen in some shots. (Crank and its sequel, High Voltage, both written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor, intentionally used Google Earth for their map transitions)
- Despite Jem and her band being hyped in the film as one of the most prominent musicians globally, we only see them perform in clubs and warehouses, meaning they are not that popular. Also, Jerrica's video goes viral with just 36,000 views on YouTube. On its own, that's not bad for a first upload, but does that warrant a record executive showing up on one's doorstep to offer a record deal? Even Justin Bieber wasn't that lucky!
- In one scene, Erica accidentally sends a poop emoji but then calls it a typo and sends the actual message. Not only is that scene unfunny at best, but its a great example of how this movie tries way too hard to be hip and cool via the use of emojis.
- Hypocritical messages.
- One of the major conflicts is that Bailey needs to make money to save her house (which even then is a plot that's been done a million times before), but Jerrica never once considers selling Synergy, a fully functioning robot with consciousness, but instead does everything to screw her and her sisters over.
- Jerrica's dad's final message to her feels like favoritism. The letter is addressed explicitly to Jerrica and barely mentions Kimber.
- Speaking of Jerrica's dad, why would he send her on a journey of finding parts of Synergy?
- The parts could easily end up getting lost and scattered from place to place, or they could've ended up being taken by others very easily.
- He could've put all of the pieces together and financially help his family.
- The reward is so underwhelming; it's pointless.
- Pointless celebrity cameos. Instead of getting them to cameo in the film, the film's creators instead used archived videos of them and edited them from their original context to make it look like they were talking about this film's Jem. It's done poorly too: Dwayne, "The Rock" Johnson, was initially talking about Taylor Swift's song "Bad Blood" instead of this film's song "Young Blood" (he also spoke about Taylor Swift in Central Intelligence), while Chris Pratt's joke about dating Jem was actually from an interview for The LEGO Movie where he joked about pretending to date his sister's Jem dolls. That last one sounds wrong when taken out of context.
- The movie's script was made ten years before the movie started development, so it's not all that surprising that it turned out the way it did.
- The movie contains a glaring error in a scene that shows Jem as a small child playing with My Little Pony toys, as she is playing with the recent FiM-era toys, even though the date the tape was recorded says it was filmed in the 1990s, while the FiM-era toys didn't come out until the 2010s.
- All of the drama that happens in the last hour of the film happens in ONE DAY. It is so rushed, so lazy, and so written.
- Overall, with how this film was trying to be hip and cool with the audience, and the fact that the plot was basically driven by Jerrica becoming viral on YouTube, it feels like it was only trying to appeal towards younger YouTube-obsessed children.
Redeeming Qualities
- Although most of the acting is pretty bad, Aubrey Peeples does do a decent job as Jerrica.
- The cameo from The Misfits is pretty cool and may be the only time the film is faithful to the series. Shame it had to be tucked away in a post-credits scene...
- They even cast Kesha as Pizzazz, which is a perfect casting choice. In fact, what makes it even better is that both Pizzazz and Kesha are of Hungarian descent (though that was probably just a coincidence).
Videos
Reception
Jem and the Holograms was theatrically released on October 23, 2015, by Universal Pictures. The film received incredibly negative reviews from critics, audiences, and fans of the original TV series. The film currently holds a 22% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average of 3.7 out of 10 and a critic consensus that reads "Jem and the Holograms ignores its source material's goofy charm in favour of bland by-the-numbers drama."
Box Office
The film was both a critical and commercial failure, grossing $2.3 million worldwide on a $5 million budget. The movie was pulled from theaters after only two weeks of release.
Trivia
- Christy Marx, the creator of the original animated series, said that she didn't know that a live-action adaptation of her show was going to be made. When the news spread, she was upset that Hasbro did not tell her about it.
- This film was released on the 30th anniversary of the premiere of Jem when it first aired in 1985.
- Aubrey Peeples was unfamiliar with Jem (1985) but became a fan of it during production.
- Film debut of Aurora Perrineau, Ke$ha and Isabella Kai Rice.
- There were plans for a sequel. However, after the film bombed at the box office, it was canceled.
External links
Jem and the Holograms (2015) at the Internet Movie Database
Jem and the Holograms (2015) on Rotten Tomatoes
Comments
- 2010s films
- Musical films
- Fantasy films
- Drama films
- Based on cartoons
- Blumhouse Productions
- Box office bombs
- Abusing the show
- Films with cancelled/scrapped sequels
- Universal films
- Movies that killed the franchise
- Films aware of how bad they are
- Twenty-plus years too late
- Based on toylines
- Hasbro films
- Low-budget films
- Live-action films
- Racist films
- "It's made for kids"
- Live action films based on cartoons
- Featured on TV Tropes' So Bad, It's Horrible
- Terrible grasp on the source material
- Bad media
- Bad movies
- Films reviewed by Joueur du Grenier