Journalduweb

The world of G.I. Joe is filled with fantastical sounding military gear. Accelerator Suits, Liquid Armor, camouflage that makes you invisible in any environment. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but all this equipment is actually closer to science fact. These technologies already exist in some form or another, from concept phase to manufacturing stage. What the ‘ GI Joe Costumes filmmakers did was take these technologies and imagine where they would be ten or twenty years from now.

“We set the story in the not so distant future which gave us the license to exploit today’s technological advances,” explains G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra director Stephen Sommers. “We’re taking technology that exists in one form or another and positing where it could possibly go.” Each of the technologies shown are “things that we all know the military are doing, we just haven’t seen them yet,” adds producer Brian Goldner. They’re all things we expect to see on the battlefield one day, just not now. “They’re what we call ‘next generation’,” says executive producer David Womark. “It’s kind of like if somebody handed you an iPhone ten years ago. If you looked at it, you could see that it could exist someday, just not yet.”

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’s costume designer, Ellen Mirojnick, embraced these ‘next generation’ designs. After first getting acquainted with the franchise, the designer and her team researched the latest military technologies. “They wanted it to give you that same feeling we all had the first time we watched James Bond,” says Mirojnick. “That was thrilling because we saw things we hadn’t seen before, and it was a whole new experience. That feeling was something Stephen was very, very anxious to capture.”