Wednesday, July 04, 2007

My Spoiler-Free Mini-Review of Transformers


Much like Hal Jordan, this movie was good-looking and stupid.

Basically, anything that wasn't giant transforming robots was terrible, and that was kind of a lot. Because this movie is looooooong and has WAY too many characters. There were so many characters that got, like, one scene and their stories never got resolved.

But it's pointless to complain about the lazy plot development of a Transformers movie. When you sit in a theatre, and the lights dim, and the first two things on the screen are A Michael Bay Film, Produced by Hasbro Toys...you know you are not going to be seeing some quality cinema.

I did find myself getting way more excited than I expected when the Autobots and Deceptacons were doing their roll calls. And just in general every time they talked or moved or transformed, it was very dope. I thought the robots looked great, and they were very big.

But crazy jerky camera work left me wondering what the hell was going on most of the time, particularly in the battle scenes. It was just really hard to watch, sometimes.

It is a good summer time at the movies, though. It ain't summer until Michael Bay blows something up.

There is one specific point I want to make about the movie, but I'll post it in the comment thread.

17 comments:

rachelle said...

Ohmygod...that last scene...where Sam and whatsherface were making out on top of Bumblebee...while the other Autobots watched?! WHAT THE HELL??!! That was so funny and creepy! They were, like, having a threesome with Bumblebee! And Prime was all "We'll be here...watching."

Oh, lord. It was fantastic.

Jason said...

"It ain't summer until Michael Bay blows something up."

Love that!

Sarah said...

HI! You know what??

I walked out of the theater, looked at my boyfriend, and said, "You know that last scene, where we were the only ones in the theater who laughed as they revealed the two main characters getting it on ON TOP of Bumblebee, while Optimus and the other Transformers watched? Rachelle is going to find that as funny as we did."

I love your blog, thank you for proving me right, and giving me a great reason to comment.

Rock.

JohnF said...

I was bored for most of it, to be completely honest. Never thought that would happen.
The robots were ridiculously over-designed, to the point that you didn't know who any of them were. It was just "random guy with 50,000 moving parts fires gun at other random guy with 50,000 moving parts"
And how did any humans last more than 5 seconds in battle with the Decepticons?

Caleb said...

Rachelle,

Okay, glad I wasn't the only one wondering if doing it on the hood of a sentient car robot constitutes a threesome or not. And it cast a real weird vibe on the earlier scene, where Bumblebee seemed to be trying to get them to make out (parking by the sunset, turning on "sexual healing"). Like, they just met, and Bumblee was all like, "Hey, why don't you kids do it now? Huh? Huh?"

Unknown said...

As a Michael Bay summer action film, it worked very well, I gave up on it being a faithful Transformers movie long ago. But to not have any Stan Bush is wrong.

Jon said...

Apart from being too long, I thought it was awesome. So there :p

Anonymous said...

That last scene had everyone in the cinema laughing. Totally looked like the Autobots were turing into the Pervobots.

I agree that there were too many characters in the story line to resolve the plot line adequately. That's why there's franchises and sequals i suppose.


But coolest sence of the enitre thing? Starscreams airial battle with the fighter jets. Had me at the first blast.

-bex

Nate said...

I liked it better than Spidey 3

rachelle said...

The more I think about this movie, the more I realize how bad it was. Everything that wasn't robots was completely stupid. Especially the hackers. What was the point of the hackers?! Aussie girl goes to the house of some superhacker, who she claims is the only one who could crack the code, except he NEVER DOES ANYTHING AT ALL except crack jokes. And are they all still in that room fighting that little robot at Hoover Dam? What was the point of Bernie Mac? Why did Prime not think of sticking the cube in Megatron's chest instead of his own? Doesn't he realize that if they killed Prime humanity would still have to deal with Megatron? Why did all the Autobots stay behind? I thought only Bumblebee was gonna. Is he their secret leader?

Plus, the Michael Bay immature humour was through the roof.

Anonymous said...

Rachelle: In response to your last post, the mistake you just made was your statement: "The more I think about this movie, the more I realize how bad it was." You aren't suppose to think about a Michael Bay movie, that's why your initial review is spot on -- you hadn't thought about the movie, you were just reacting to it emotionally.

I thought the movies was a lot of fun and it was entertaining. If I thought about it, there are probably hundreds of things that were stupid or bad, but my initial reaction was, wow, that was fun. Which is really the most you can hope for from Michael Bay.

Love your blog. Nice article on Newsarama too!

rachelle said...

Yeah, you're probably right...

...No! I can't do it! It was terrible! I was seriously so bored! There was probably 30 minutes of good content, and two hours of total garbage.

But those 30 minutes were pretty cool.

I really don't get how people can say that Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four were bad, and this was good. It's insane.

JohnF said...

See that's what I'm talking about. It was literally boring. I mean, I got up to pee twice. I never get up to pee. And I almost fell asleep. I can stick it out for any movie, but this one really tested me.
Let's not even talk about Jazz speaking ebonics.

rachelle said...

You know who else got up to pee? Bumblebee.

Terrible!

Anonymous said...

I'm with you, I thought it was pretty horrifyingly bad. Filled with plot holes, inconsitant characters, unresolved characters and terrible dialogue. While I enjoyed some of the action sequences, I spent most of the movie thinking "what am I watching? Is this script written by teenagers?"

rachelle said...

THANK YOU!

If I hear one more person tell me it was the best movie EVER I'm going to cry. I watched Independence Day two days later and it seemed like a masterpiece by comparison.

Anonymous said...

I saw it today, and was seriously bored. I wish I had read all of these comments before seeing it, but I figured it would be near impossible to mess up giant robots pounding on each other. Hollywood proved me wrong again.
I was hoping that Megatron would be super-powered by the Cube, and Prime would yell out "You stupid ape-child, we were trying to keep it AWAY from him!"