...and its truly, truly outrageously awful!
In a nutshell, Justin Jerrica Benton becomes a huge popstar after becoming discovered on YouTube an major internet video site, and pointless melodrama ensues. If it sounds all too familiar, it is being produced by Jon Chu, a.k.a., the guy who directed Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.
From how the trailer plays out, it is a bland rehashing of the Justin Bieber movie, striped of all the elements that made the cartoon show interesting. At first, I thought it was one of those low-budget fan-trailers, but the trailer was so awful, that it could only be something Hollywood would brew-up. After all, when people make fan-trailers, they usually but a lot of though and heart into the project, and make it compliment the original source, then an affront to it. It looks like the same, boring ball of mangled clichés I've seen a thousand times before. If you do see it, keep your expectations low... I mean "knocking at the gates of Purgatory" low, if not lower! I know I sound like a downer, not giving it a chance, but I seen enough trailers to know its going to suck, and suck hard! All we can hope for, is to pressure the studio to pull it and flush it down the toilet, like some much $&#%! But you know they wont, and they will never learn form it.
As for whats featured in the trailer: "Jem" is a public persona established by the big-wings at Starlight Records, instead of being a self-established secret identity. Since Rio was there, he knows that Jerrica is Jem. Jerrica is presented as a teenager in this movie, and Rio looks an adult. It it goes beyond a "crush," it is going to get super creepy, super fast! There are no high-tech holographic technology in the movie — a major hook in the cartoon — and a think "Synergy" might be a nickname for the band's makeup artist. The Misfits are absent form the trailer, and the major conflict is the studio trying to get Jerrica to go solo, leaving her sister high and dry.
One of my biggest fears with a Jem revision is that Jem and the Holograms were a product of its own time. Even with the '80s nostalgia craze hitting pop-culture these days, the 1980s was the 1980s, and it hard to make what work then, work today. Much of the crazy drama from the cartoon seems over-the-top and insane, but that was the music scene back then. Bands would engage in ego-filled $#%&ing contests as standoffish as any big wrestling match, as the antics and personalities of well-known singers and band members where the stuff of legends! Hair Bands and pop singers dress-up in ways that made cartoon Jem look quaint, and without the aura of attention-grasping desperation Lady Gaga garners. Overlooking the reality of how truly dreadful that decade was, and not as wild and neon/pestle-colored as a lot of people clam it was, it was such unique time into itself.