Before tonight's ShoWest screening of The Soloist, Paramount had a surprise for pretty much everyone in the audience-- a look at brand-new, unfinished footage from this summer's G.I. Joe. The plot details seem mostly the same from what we saw in the Super Bowl trailer-- bad guy with Scottish accent taking over the world, destroying the Eiffel Tower-- but a lot more details and scenes add depth to a movie that, to be honest, seemed a little silly to me before.

Oddly, the one line of dialogue from the Super Bowl spot-- "Technically this unit doesn't exist. We answer to no one. And when all else fails, we don't."-- seems to be said by Dennis Quaid in this trailer, whereas before it was Channing Tatum? (Correct me if I'm wrong here-- I'm not up on my beefcake voice recognition). But most everything else was just an extended version of what we've seen before, with the dudes trying out the exoskeleton suits in the streets and the Eiffel Tower crashing in an extended sequence.

There's a little more explanation for the Eiffel Tower disintegrating into green powder, though. Apparently this movie's baddie is using "nanomites," little beasts developed for cancer research that are capable of chewing through metal. They showed up later in the footage as well, attacking fighter planes presumably used by the good guys. It should be clear at this point that I know nothing about the world of G.I. Joe, but that said, I wasn't confused at all by the trailer. All anyone seems to need to know here is that this is an international team of badasses led by Dennis Quaid, and they've got the technology to make us jealous.

A few of the effects in the clips we saw looked cheesy, but those can almost definitely be chalked up to the fact that they're unfinished. And overall I was impressed with what I saw, though it'll be interesting to see more of the film than just action sequences and witty quips from Dennis Quaid. That's where effects-heavy movies like these can fall apart entirely, and on that count, G.I. Joe isn't out of the woods just yet.