Jem and the Holograms was always a special case when it came to children’s programming.
Much like the recent success of My Little Pony, Jem and the Holograms premiered on October 26th 1985 with the intention to be just another tie in cartoon aimed at young girls through Hasbro’s eyes. However, the team behind the show decided to treat the show with as much respect as they would with any regular TV show. Some of its appeal came from the fact that it was an animated soap opera that both boys & girls of all ages can enjoy. You’d think that with Hollywood’s recent obsession to make crazy experimental movies off of 80’s-90’s properties with big budgets that surely Jem would fit in perfectly.
Enter 2015’s Jem and the Holograms, a film supposedly “based” off of said beloved franchise. Directed and produced by the same people who made 2 documentaries centering on Justin Bieber and the production house that made Paranormal Activity, surely this could only end well right? Sadly, what follows is an under budgeted, cheaply made, clichéd rags to riches story that feels more like an after school special and barley even resembles its source material. Where do I begin?
Let’s start with story. Here’s the synopsis of the animated series lifted directly from the season 1 DVD:
Upon the death of her father, Jerrica Benton inherits Starlight Music and finds herself the new co-owner executive alongside the greedy, power-hungry Eric Raymond. Eric is on a mission to seize complete control of Starlight Music, as well as, use it to launch to stardom his latest discovery — rockin’ rebel girl band The Misfits.
With the help of Synergy, a computer holographic machine created by her father, and a pair of special jemstar earrings, Jerrica is able to transform into the megapop sensation named Jem! With her sister, Kimber, and their band, The Holograms, Jem undertakes a battle-of-the-bands competition against Eric and The Misfits for control of Starlight Music. Can Jerrica keep her superstar identity a secret? Will The Misfits rock the charts? Will Synergy fall into the hands of evil? Watch and find out!
Sounds pretty cool huh? Well forget about all that because nothing mentioned above is carried to the film. Instead, we get a story about 18/19 year old Jerrica Benton who’s insecure about her singing. One night she throws on a pink wig and some make-up to record her singing under the mysterious name Jem. The next day Jerrica wakes up to find out that her sister Kimber uploaded the video to YouTube, and now Jem has become instantly internet famous to a point where she is offered a recording contract for only having 30,000 views on her video. This quickly turns her whole life upside down and now she has to struggle between her 2 identities to find out who she really is.
As you can tell, the plot follows the generic, paint by numbers story of some regular Joe Shmoe that’s all of a sudden thrust into popularity. It also doesn’t help that just like Jerrica; this movie suffers heavily from an identity crisis. At one point it wants to be a modern teen drama movie, other times it’s trying to force in un-necessary subplots that add virtually nothing to the film. Some subplots include going on a tedious treasure hunt trying to find the missing pieces of their robot Synergy so they can recover a hidden surprise that Jerrica’s father was trying to hide. The other includes a very tiresome and cliché story of Jerrica, the evil corporate band manager, trying to force Jem into signing a solo contract.
The only problem is that the movie is so confused on what it wants to be that nothing comes together in the end, and as a result, the movie just ends up being a giant mess. It also doesn’t help that the characters are more bland and dry than a loaf of white bread sitting out in the sun. I’ll give them credit that the cast at least tries to make their roles convincing, it’s just too bad that they have to suffer due to the clunky script or awful mis-casting. Such mis-casting is 28 year old Ryan Guzman as Rio who in the movie is trying to pass himself off as an 18 year old college intern/son of Erica Raymond. It’s so laughably bad the dialogue he’s given that it’s impossible to take him seriously every time he’s on screen.
Another major problem with the movie is the music. In the show, there were usually 2-3 songs per episode that lasted about 45 seconds to a minute, making for some quick, but catchy songs. The movie however, tries in some areas, but sadly ends up botching them. Besides sounding like the most generic and manufactured pop songs, are too long and very forgettable.
This is another area where the movie really fails hard since you need good music in a movie adaptation that’s all about music. The worst thing about the audio is that they don’t even use their own background music. During what’s supposed to be a tense or emotional scene the background music chosen will start playing. The problem with this however, is that these BGM’S are taken from random people on YouTube playing their own music and for some reason the film seems to think randomly cutting in grainy low quality footage of said music videos would be a good idea (it isn’t.)
Thought you heard the worst? Well I’m sorry to say, but the worst is yet to come. When it comes to scene changes and transitions they will more often than not resort to using Google Earth. I know this film was made on a small budget of $5 million, but do they really have to be that lazy. I counted at least 6-7 times where they used this lazy excuse of transition (you can still see the Google Earth logo lazily cropped in the lower right hand corner of the screen.)
Finally, the worst part of this film is it’s mis-treatment of fans and lazy excuse of “cameos.” Throughout her rise to fame, the movie will start random cutting to cameos talking about Jem. These include Chris Pratt, Jimmy Fallon, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The only problem? It’s all archival footage. The Pratt interview was taken from a Lego Movie Interview with USA Today in which he talks about growing up with the Jem dolls and pretending to date them. The Fallon interview comes from an old episode where he and a guest reminisce about the 80’s cartoon. The 3rd and most offensive is The Rock’s cameo which was just a very low quality video that was actually about him praising Taylor Swift’s song Bad Blood.
At the end of the day though, the fans themselves were treated the worst. When the film was originally announced, they made it a point to tell the online world that they were doing open casting for the film and that you had a chance to land a starring role in the film if you expressed how much you love Jem to them. What ended up happening was that they ended up using that footage randomly throughout the movie to show her rise in internet popularity. The absolute biggest insult to this is that throughout all the videos you’re constantly seeing the 80’s logo and show in the background and right in front of the camera. This alone was enough to pull me out of the movie and feel sorry for all the fans that got gipped of a proper appearance as initially advertised.
The only good thing about this movie was the end credits scene. That one scene was the only time the movie actually felt like it was actually putting in effort to be a real Jem movie. The only problem? The film ends after that.
Hint Hint.
So, after all of this should you still go see Jem and the Holograms? Yes. This is one of those rare movies that comes along every couple of years or so that completely fails in what it’s trying to do and is so horrendously bad that you have to watch it to believe it. If somehow there’s a theater near you showing this film, you should either try sneaking into it, or just going to another movie and then catching the end credits scene at least. If you want to see a more faithful adaption movie, go see The Peanuts Movie.
FINAL RATING: 0.5/5 WATCH IT! (or just watch the after credits scene)