{"id":1233,"date":"2007-07-08T07:00:07","date_gmt":"2007-07-08T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1233"},"modified":"2007-07-09T07:56:02","modified_gmt":"2007-07-09T12:56:02","slug":"transformers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1233","title":{"rendered":"Transformers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw Transformers<\/a> this weekend. Spoler-free review follows:<\/p>\n

I don’t have much new to add to what has already been said about this movie. Like everyone else<\/del> I thought this was an overlong movie where everything (everything!) was turned up to eleven and running at 110%. All the time. The dialog was enslaved by the plot, and the stunts went from “that’s kind of hard to believe” to “I don’t believe that for a second” and finally reached the zenith of “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”<\/p>\n

Director Michael Bay is the sorcerer’s apprentice. He’s got Spielberg’s spellbook, but where Spielberg makes magic, Michael Bay just makes a mess. I can see what he’s trying to do, and I can see he’s missing by a mile. At one point the teenage protagonist needs to go into his house to get his grandfather’s eyeglasses<\/span>, and then he needs to leave with the robots. It’s late at night and he’s out after curfew. The bots “hide” in the yard, and the kid goes in to get the MacGuffin. What follows is a scene of intended suspense where we’re supposed to worry that the parents will discover the bots. It was supposed to come off like the moment in E.T. where the mother opens the closet door and nearly discovers the alien. The problem with the scene in Transformers was that I didn’t believe the behavior of the characters, I didn’t care if the parents saw the bots, and the scene dragged on for about five more minutes after all the energy was played out. In more deft hands this could have been both funny and suspenseful, but instead I felt that Michel Bay was just wasting my time. <\/p>\n

The cast of characters was small, but the cast of caricatures was huge. The movie has not one, but two Bruckheimer-style Wacky Black Guys<\/a>. You can see their jokes coming from miles away, and it takes forever for them to get around to screeching their frantic, quasi-punchlines. <\/p>\n

Note to Michel Bay: Hoooold the camera stilllllllllllll. It looks like the filmmakers met their affirmative action quota by hiring a crackhead with Parkenson’s disease and<\/i> ADHD to hold the camera. The result was one frenzied action scene after another with blurry, swinging camera pans. During the final battle I could never figure out what the battlefield looked like. I never got a sense of, “Good guys over here, bad guys over there.” It was just a chain of closeups on our actors followed by blurry, seismic camera shots of robots and shooting. <\/p>\n

The robots had the predictable and tiresome “but humans are so violent” philosophical debate. At this point we’re pretty much used to sanctimonious aliens showing up and tut-tutting at us in movies, although it was pretty irritating to hear it coming from a bunch of robots who’d had a war that destroyed their entire homeworld<\/em>, to the point of making it uninhabitable for robots<\/b><\/i>. <\/p>\n

To be fair, this movie is based on an 80’s cartoon. No, this ain’t Shakespeare. The show was silly to begin with (I liked it anyway) but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to smarten it up a bit for the big screen. It wouldn’t have taken much. Instead, they had a very good try at dumbing it down, if such a thing is possible.<\/p>\n

On the upside, the special effects were indeed great, and I fully admit that when I heard the voice of Peter Cullen<\/a> reprising his role as Optimus Prime, I got a little tingle. The movie had a few moments that really worked for me, and it managed to wring a smile out of me amidst the eye rolling. The giant-robots-punching-each-other stuff was perfect. So was the transforming. <\/p>\n

Michael Bay seems to aspire to become a Spielberg, but too often he gives in and takes the quick and easy path, which leads to the dark side and Jerry Bruckheimer. Slow down man. Take three<\/i> of those dozen characters and fill them out. Dial the stunts down to “I might be able to believe that could happen under very specific conditions”. Take out the thudding jokes, posturing, witless banter, and catchphrases. In place of all of that, give us some dialog. You know. Like characters. Talking. You may have seen this done in other movies. It’s surprisingly effective. Then cut forty minutes off the movie. <\/p>\n

And add Optimus Rhyme<\/a> to the soundtrack.<\/p>\n

EDIT: The “Like everyone else” comment above isn’t really true. It only applies to the people I’d spoken to and the reviews I’d glanced at. The movie is doing okay vs. critics, and lots of people really enjoyed it. Read the comments for some alternate takes on the movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw Transformers this weekend. Spoler-free review follows: I don’t have much new to add to what has already been said about this movie. Like everyone else I thought this was an overlong movie where everything (everything!) was turned up to eleven and running at 110%. All the time. The dialog was enslaved by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}