Here’s How Jem and the Holograms Star Aubrey Peeples Transformed into the

Sure, there are plenty of nods to the “80s cartoon: the characters” names, the star earrings, the hologram-producing Synergy (yes, Synergy is in the movie) and even, in one fan-service scene, Jerrica’s (Aubrey Peeples) jealousy of Rio’s (Ryan Guzman) affection for her Jem persona. It turns out it’s much more hard to manufacture a faux-superstar from scratch.

Don’t even get me started on the screenplay.

Jon M. Chu has always been a resourceful filmmaker, dating back to his childhood when he shot mini-movies in his backyard with G.I. Joe action figures – experience that became particularly helpful when he made “G.I”.

Jem and the Holograms hits theaters on October 23. The plot involves Jerrica reassembling her father’s greatest invention and finding out how much he really loved her, but she also has a sister named Kimber, and Kimber doesn’t get equally involved in that mission. In honor of the movie’s upcoming release, beauty vlogger Promise Phan has created a brand new Jem and the Holograms-inspired tutorial for her show, “Face the Movies”, on Michelle Phan’s ICON Network! And it has much better music than the generic, overproduced and totally antithetical to the story pop songs found in this completely worthless picture, which I dare say is the worst adaptation of a Hasbro property yet, and that’s saying a lot. In fact, Jem and the Holograms is so committed to the concept that it looks like an online video, washed-out in a low-resolution gray that exposes its exceptionally modest $5 million budget. Okay, that’s fair! I will say this though: I saw Jem and the Holograms with around 50 teenage girls and their response was, at best, “distracted”.

Numerous movie’s emotional moments are underscored by Youtube videos, rather than a traditional soundtrack, and although that felt too “hello fellow kids” to me most of the time, it was fun to see a few of my favorite Youtube peeps have a cameo (the cameos in this movie are all awesome, actually), and I was pleasantly surprised by the respect Jem and the Holograms showed the “Internet generation” and the female fandoms the Internet has helped strengthen. “Jem and her sisters have a really tight bond”.

All that adventure/excitement and fashion/fame promised in the Eighties cartoon show’s theme song proves beyond the budgetary scope of this iteration, which is mostly a series of fumbled close-ups of the star and her band/sisters, as a wicked manager (Juliette Lewis) endeavors to make them over and fully monetize that talent. Yet that adoration for Jem, old Jem, original Jem, doesn’t have any place in a feature that’s been “reinvented”, which explains why all those fawning videos have been edited into the film to appear as if they are addressed to the new Jem, who watches them all, teary-eyed and bolstered by the outpouring of love from “her” fans. Ryan Landels’ script lifts the premise nearly beat-for-beat-teen musician becomes overnight sensation, signs a Faustian deal with a slick-talking label executive (Juliette Lewis in the Posey role), and loses her bandmates in a bid for solo stardom.

Marx, however, had lovely things to say about Chu, “I want to say good things about John [sic] Chu. His take is somewhat different from the approach I wanted to take, but that just means it’s different, not that there’s anything wrong with it. I urge everyone to judge the merits of his work on the result and I hope he delivers us an excellent, truly outrageous movie”.

To my mind, a Jem movie without the Misfits is like Batman without The Joker. It just wants to sell you a product. In the film, YouTube is her ticket to success when social media-savvy younger sister Kimber (Stefanie Scott) secretly uploads an acoustic performance Jerrica/Jem filmed in her bedroom and the clip immediately goes viral.