Review of Jem and the Holograms (2015) by Striking4Gold4 — 25 Jul 2017

Jem and the Holograms sets a brand new low to how bad a cartoon adaptation is. Lemme get the elephant in the room out of the way: the movie takes everything that makes the show great and decimates it. Oh, trust me, I don't mean like a product of its time with one or two things from the show, you have no idea how unfaithful to the cartoon this can get.

The story of the movie just is your bland everyday band drama we've seen hundreds of times, where I'd rather watch the YouTube video segues than the movie itself, the characters are all one-dimensional, and by that I mean all of them, and the songs are horribly written.

But the weirdest aspect of them all is the ending. Little known fact: the creators actually gave the fans of the show a chance to be in it, but once they were submitted, the creators edit it to make the fans look like they're not talking about cartoon Jem, but the movie version.

And it is INCREDIBLY lazy. My biggest example is that there's one shot of a guy dancing and you can see the cartoon playing in the background. Wow. That is the laziest thing I've ever seen in an adaptation.

The plus to the movie? Well, the performance of Audrey Peeples is fine, the songs are, although terribly written, kind of nice to listen to, and again, I'd rather watch 1 hour and 30 minutes the YouTube video segues than the movie itself.

At least the people in the segues are showing talent. I may have never watched the cartoon, but I know a bad adaptation when I see one. Like I said before, the movie takes its source material, and rips it to shreds into a badly written and lazy band drama.