As the movie opens, she and her kid sister, Kimber (Stefanie Scott), are living with their aunt and cousins in the poor side of the San Bernardino Valley. It’s chock-full of “Don’t you get it? You are a star!” moments, delivered to a performer disinterested in presuming the mantle of an icon.Īubrey Peeples dutifully performs her very best Bella Swan impersonation in order for Jem to fulfill Jerrica’s humble-warrior flexing. This film only wants to rectify it, if not dismiss it altogether. The original show was fueled by Jem/Jerrica’s intrapersonal tension.
(Chalk that one up as another missed opportunity among my own cautionary tales from the “It Gets Better” crypt.) But in the world of 2015’s Jem, escapism has aligned itself entirely with impulsive self-definition, played out in real time through social-media channels, making the whole proceedings much closer to a Muppet Babies recreation of Videodrome than a glam-rock revision of Barbie.
I may be among the very few gay children of the ‘80s who didn’t worship Jem’s world-beating music-circuit rampage as the playful coming-out metaphor it clearly, in retrospect, was. It was just selling much better, more readily adaptable merchandise. This isn’t to deny that the original Hasbro show was also selling merchandise. In this misbegotten reboot, Synergy only represents the marketable love child of R2D2 and WALL-E’s Eva. She also represented, to the girls and gay boys who cherished the show, the chimera of interacting with your own hidden identities her function was built right into her nomenclature. In the quintessentially ‘80s Saturday-morning cartoon series, Synergy wasn’t just the Sapphic supercomputer and quick-change artist capable of making over Jerrica Benton into rock star Jem in a flash. It’s because his dead-eyed gaze falls upon some dog-eared, chirping, single serving-sized robot spinning merry donuts on the corner of the stage. Rio (Ryan Guzman) blurts the new band name out when a top Rolling Stone editor asks for the vital stats of his newest and hottest musical act, but his report isn’t the result of a flint of inspiration or thematic summation.
Chu’s live-action update of the Hasbro franchise, happens in the tossed-off improvisation of the moment. The christening of Jem and the Holograms, like almost everything else in director Jon M.