It's also hard to argue how beautiful the movie is. Truthfully, there's not a weak link in the cast, with supporting characters like Arashikage head of security Akiko (Haruka Abe) and the villainous Kenta (Takehiro Hira), among others, rounding out the story. Still, the movie hints that they have a long history at odds with each other, which is something that would be fun to explore in future movies. Weaving and Corberó, too, work well together in the scenes they share, though theirs is more of a humorous pairing. The brotherhood between them is very believable. Thankfully, Golding and Koji are well-suited to bring Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow to life and there's an easy chemistry between them on-screen. After a decade of MCU movies digging deep into the lore of comic book superheroes, though, you should be able to actually do the work in showing who your characters are and why the audience should care. Every individual Joe and member of Cobra doesn't need their own movie, but it's nice to have a reason to root for or against them beyond a surface-level explanation of, "Cobra are the bad guys." The original GI Joe might have been able to get away with keeping things that simple. Should this franchise actually come to fruition, though, it would be more enjoyable for future films to delve deeper into characters like this movie does with Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. While the information dumps about GI Joe and Cobra aren't as fleshed out as they could have been, it is exciting to hear that this secret war is being carried out while the world is none the wiser. The film also explains the core of both GI Joe and Cobra, clueing Snake Eyes in to a bigger world of assassins and warriors than he could have ever expected. Unlike Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, the movie doesn't explore these two characters much. Both GI Joe's Scarlett (Samara Weaving) and Cobra second-in-command Baroness (Úrsula Corberó) get thrown into the mix. While the movie does a lot to tell the story of both Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, they aren't the only GI Joe characters that appear. If Snake Eyes is any indication, this new direction for GI Joe is looking to change that-at least for some of its characters. It was clear who was good and who was evil on the original GI Joe animated series. There will be some GI Joe purists who prefer to know nothing about Snake Eyes' past, but it's refreshing to see the building blocks behind the iconic masked warrior and what motivates him to not only become a master assassin but drives him toward the GI Joe unit.
That journey leads to him training to join the Arashikage ninja clan and befriending Tommy Arashikage (Andrew Koji), who GI Joe fans will recognize as the man that eventually becomes Snake's arch-nemesis Storm Shadow. After watching his father be executed, we find him again as an adult, known only as Snake Eyes, with a thirst for revenge to find the one who killed his dad. The movie dips into the character's history, starting with childhood.
With Crazy Rich Asians and A Simple Favor star Henry Golding cast in the title role and a slew of seeds planted for a new GI Joe film universe, though, Snake Eyes is better than you'd expect. After all, traditionally movies that give backstories to characters that don't need them have a spotty track record (Hey, Rob Zombie's Halloween remake). When it was revealed in 2018 that the GI Joe movie franchise would be rebooted with an origin story for Snake Eyes-a character that never shows his face and never speaks, with a mysterious past-it certainly didn't seem like a good idea.