G.I. Joe: Retaliation

With the Cobra operative Zartan still impersonating the President of the United States behind a perfect nanomite disguise, Cobra moves to seize the world. In a single night, the disguised President orders an airstrike that frames the G.I. Joe team for treason and wipes out almost all of them, killing their field leader Duke. Only three survive: Roadblock, Flint and Lady Jaye, who dive into a well as the missiles fall.

Convinced the impostor in the Oval Office is the real threat, the survivors go underground and seek out the one man who can help them strike back: General Joseph Colton, the original G.I. Joe, living in quiet retirement. Half a world away, the Arashikage ninja Storm Shadow breaks the imprisoned Cobra Commander out of an underground German prison, while Snake Eyes and his apprentice Jinx are dispatched by the Blind Master to capture Storm Shadow and uncover the truth about a long-ago murder.

Cobra Commander's endgame is Project Zeus, a constellation of orbital kinetic-bombardment weapons that drop tungsten rods from space with the force of a meteor. He lures the world's nuclear powers to a summit, tricks them into disarming, levels central London as a demonstration, and demands the planet kneel. The decimated Joes, armed by Colton and joined by a defecting Storm Shadow, race to expose the impostor President, rescue the real one, and shut Zeus down before Cobra rules everything.

2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra had made money but taken a critical beating, and Paramount wanted a do-over that would not alienate the first film's audience. The studio, with Hasbro's Brian Goldner and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, set out to build what director Jon M. Chu called a reboot that also served as a sequel: a harder, more grounded, more militaristic film that quietly cleared most of the original cast off the board.

Hasbro hired the Zombieland writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and in February 2011 Paramount handed the chair not to returning director Stephen Sommers but to Jon M. Chu, a young filmmaker known for the Step Up dance pictures and the Justin Bieber concert documentary. It was a counterintuitive choice that paid off: Chu was a lifelong G.I. Joe fan, comfortable with 3D, and his dance background gave him an unusual instinct for choreographed action. The budget landed somewhere between 130 and 155 million dollars, with MGM and David Ellison's Skydance each taking a 25 percent equity stake.

Principal photography began in Louisiana in August 2011. The production was marked by tragedy when crew member Mike Huber was killed on a New Orleans soundstage in November 2011 after a scissor lift fell on him. Fort Pike, Louisiana stood in for Fort Sumter in the film's climax, and a NASA facility once used to build Space Shuttle fuel tanks would become the stage for its most famous scene.

The single biggest change was the lead. Where the first film centred on Channing Tatum's Duke, Retaliation handed the franchise to Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock, the team's heavy machine gunner, cast in June 2011 as the new marquee anchor. Johnson was on his way to becoming the most bankable star in the world, and Paramount paired him with another piece of stunt casting, Bruce Willis as the original G.I. Joe, to give the soft reboot two fresh, recognisable faces.

The strategy was deliberate: rebuild the brand around a bigger, harder star and a more serious tone, and let the new Roadblock carry the series forward. By the finale he wields an M1911 pistol said to have belonged to General Patton, handed to him by Colton, firing a single shot in tribute to the fallen Joes. It was a clean passing of the torch from the first film's teen-movie energy to a muscular action vehicle built on Johnson's shoulders.

If Retaliation is remembered for one thing, it is the nine-minute, almost dialogue-free ninja battle waged on the sheer face of a Himalayan mountain. Snake Eyes and Jinx extract a captured Storm Shadow down a vertical cliff while Storm Shadow's red ninjas swing in on ropes and zip-lines, sword-fighting in mid-air as an avalanche bears down. Critics who savaged the rest of the film singled it out as one of the best action sequences of its year.

It began, improbably, with furniture and toys. Jon M. Chu blocked the entire sequence in a room using couches, chairs and lamps as the mountain peaks, with Hasbro ninja figures as the combatants and a real mountain climber advising where rope anchors would realistically need to be. 'When I look at the sequence,' Chu said, 'I just see lamps and chairs and stuff.' Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura called it the longest single scene he had ever been involved with: 'That scene took months and months and months.'

The reality was split across two worlds. Stunt performers in ninja suits were rigged a thousand feet up real mountains near Vancouver, flying across the rock in freezing cold, while the bulk of the performance was shot against a giant angled green screen built inside NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana, the building once used to fabricate Space Shuttle external tanks. Industrial Light and Magic then replaced everything behind the performers with a fully digital mountain, adding wet granite reflections, contact shadows, and a constant 'camera float' so it feels like the operator is hanging from a rope alongside the ninjas. Where Chu wanted a blow to land harder, ILM blended digital limbs onto the real stunt performers, in supervisor Bill George's words: 'We replaced limbs on the stunt performers with pieces of our digital doubles. Kapow!' The whole sequence is a deliberate homage to Larry Hama's celebrated silent comic, G.I. Joe issue 21, 'Silent Interlude,' from 1984.

Behind the two marquee sequences sat a roughly 700-shot visual-effects effort split across three major houses, supervised overall by James Madigan. ILM handled the cliff duel, London, and a White House reveal in which Cobra banners drop down the facade. Digital Domain took the most technically punishing work, and Method Studios delivered the film's opening carnage.

Digital Domain's roster is a tour of early-2010s VFX craft. The reveal of Zartan's true face beneath the President's, achieved by cutting his skin to expose self-repairing nanomites, reused the digital head-replacement technology built for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and TRON: Legacy, morphing Jonathan Pryce into Arnold Vosloo down to the meniscus of the eye. The film's ICBM explosion was, at the time, the single biggest simulation in the studio's history: one continuous Houdini gas solve topping a billion voxels, referenced from real Peacekeeper missile footage. Firefly's motorcycle was LIDAR-scanned and rigged to break apart into a swarm of missiles in slow motion, and Roadblock's duel with three Cobra HISS tanks was built from a real working tank, scanned and relit shot by shot.

Method Studios staged the night Apache ambush that wipes out the Joes, building two versions of the desert camp, one pristine and one to be destroyed, and delivering CG helicopters, tracer fire and full night-vision views. Method also modeled Firefly's signature explosive robotic fireflies down to the tiny servos operating the irises of their eyes. The entire film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D in post by Stereo D, the conversion that had triggered the delay, and which Paramount said cost only about 5 million dollars; roughly 45 percent of the film's eventual gross would come from 3D screens.

Bruce Willis joining as General Joseph Colton, 'the original G.I. Joe,' was the reboot's other marquee stroke. The role nearly went to the real-world wrestler Sgt. Slaughter, a G.I. Joe icon, until a toy-rights conflict between Hasbro and Mattel blocked it, and Colton was written in his place. Around Willis and Johnson, the team filled out with Adrianne Palicki's Lady Jaye, who cracks the impostor-President plot, D.J. Cotrona's Flint, and the returning Ray Park as Snake Eyes.

On the Cobra side, the recasting was heavier. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who had played Cobra Commander as Rex Lewis in the first film, was busy with The Dark Knight Rises, so the masked Commander was played on screen by Luke Bracey and voiced, uncredited, by Robert Baker. Christopher Eccleston did not return as Destro, who is reduced to a brief imprisoned cameo. The most interesting arc belongs to Byung-hun Lee's Storm Shadow, revealed to have been framed by Zartan for murdering his own uncle, the Hard Master, and secretly working to destroy Cobra from within; he defects, kills Zartan, and avenges his master. Ray Stevenson's Firefly, an ex-Joe turned Cobra demolitions expert, and RZA as the blind leader of the Arashikage round out a deep ensemble. RZA, whose Wu-Tang roots are steeped in kung-fu cinema, reportedly asked Hasbro for a flying guillotine for his action figure.

When it finally opened on March 28, 2013, the gamble paid off where it counted. Retaliation took about 10.5 million dollars on its opening day and 40.5 million across its first weekend at number one. That was actually down roughly 14 percent from the first film's 54.7 million debut, but the back half and the overseas leg were a different story. China alone delivered around 33 million dollars on opening, the single biggest foreign market, vindicating the 3D conversion.

The film finished with about 122.5 million dollars domestically and 253.2 million internationally, for 375.7 million worldwide. That comfortably beat The Rise of Cobra's 302.5 million and made Retaliation the highest-grossing film of the live-action G.I. Joe series, a record it still holds. It was proof that the international, 3D-forward strategy worked even when the domestic opening came in softer than its predecessor.

Retaliation remains the commercial high-water mark of the live-action G.I. Joe films and, for many fans, the better-crafted of the two on pure action merit. Its cliff-face ninja duel is still the sequence the franchise is measured against, the rare set piece that even hostile critics concede is genuinely great.

It was also, quietly, the end of the line for the G.I. Joe team on screen. A third film spent years in development, attached to Chu, then D.J. Caruso, retitled Ever Vigilant, with Roadblock assembling a new squad against the Cobra twins Tomax and Xamot. It never shot, stalled largely by Dwayne Johnson's exploding schedule, and its release slot was eventually handed to a reboot. That reboot, 2021's Snake Eyes, abandoned the Retaliation continuity entirely and flopped hard, grossing under 40 million dollars and effectively ending near-term plans for Joe features. Hasbro's wider shared-universe ambitions fizzled too.

So Retaliation stands as the last true G.I. Joe team movie, the one that delivered a passing of the torch to Roadblock that the franchise never got to follow up. Everything after it either died in development or died at the box office, which only sharpens its standing: the high point of the live-action era, anchored by a nine-minute fight on the side of a mountain that nobody has topped.