G.I. Joe: Resolute
Our Review
G.I. Joe: Resolute is the greatest G.I. Joe story ever told and it only lasted ten short episodes plus a finale. Released on Adult Swim’s website in April 2009, written by Warren Ellis and directed by Joaquim Dos Santos with Sam Register producing, it opens with a rescue through a North African mine field and within one episode Cobra Commander goes on the strategic offensive and takes the Joe team’s own base.
The art direction is what separates it from everything else in the franchise: flat colors, hard silhouettes, a retro design that takes the 1985 character models seriously enough to animate them like sixties war posters, and consequences the franchise had never allowed, including a Moscow that does not survive the season. The serialization is a commando epic: Snake Eyes and Flint work loose while the captured team sits inside Cobra’s mountain, and the two part finale resolves the war while openly setting up a larger campaign that never arrived. Hasbro moved on, the series quietly vanished from its own home, and the fan campaigns produced nothing.
Every ten minutes of it is better composed than most of the franchise’s big budget films, which makes it simultaneously the best adult entry point and the saddest cancellation on this site. The full cut still surfaces free on the official G.I. Joe YouTube channel, and eleven episodes is one sitting. Watch it before you have an opinion about anything else in this franchise.
