The trailer for Jem and the Holograms has landed. And it'll leave you wishing air control hadn't given it permission. The only time I wasn't cringing, while watching my childhood being ravaged, was when Molly Ringwald unexpectedly showed up and I briefly thought Oh, hey, Molly! before going back to making this face.
I get that this is a reboot and that films of this nature often deviate from the source material to stay current, but there's something about this that feels hollow and uninspired. The storyline is so generic that it could have been about anyone. Why get Jem and all the nostalgia that comes along with her involved? Why rankle everyone born in the late '70s/early '80s?
Perhaps the reason this movie doesn't seem to have the same feminist spark as the cartoon is that everyone working on it is a dude. Jem and the Holograms creator Christy Marx wasn't asked to consult on the film, let alone write for it, despite the majority of Jem's world being a product of her brain. Here's what she had to say about this whole thing on her Facebook page:
"I don’t think I can hide that I’m deeply unhappy about being shut out of the project. That no one in the entertainment arm of Hasbro wanted to talk to me, have me write for it, or at the very least consult on it. I wouldn’t be human if that failed to bother me.
