I hadn’t planned to watch this, but I had nothing else to do, so I went with Kelvin and Andrew. So admittedly, I walked into the movie really low expectations. Actually, so did Andrew, but he still hated it. Kelvin got what he expected and enjoyed it.
What was exactly was I expecting? Well, knowing this is a Michael Bay film, lots of explosions, nauseating editing… and more explosions and special effects, usually at the expense of plot and story. I also expected to hate the humans, because come on, people watch this movie for giant, battling robots, not little, squishy humans. And since we want to watch fighting robots, humans can only mean attempts to make story, which takes away from battling robots, which is bad. I also expected very little connection with the original series (tho that isn’t as big of a deal for me, since I was more of a “My Little Pony” girl in the 80s anyway), so I wasn’t expecting to like the robots either.
Okay, well, the story and script were pretty bad. And the acting… generally terrible. And there was A LOT of it. For a Michael Bay film about Transformers, there was surprisingly a lot of attempts at story and drama, particularly with the humans. Actually, I’d say only with the humans. Way too much human time. Like I said, more human time = less robot time = suck. In fact, there was an entire tangent about hackers that should have been removed. But I do make an exception about the sucky-humans observation, and that was with the main character Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LeBeouf. He wasn’t hot, but I found him to be a very, very likable dork/loser. I liked his scenes, and his acting didn’t suck (probably the only decent human actor in the film). In one scene, he’s trying to subtly show off to his love interest with his (un)impressive biceps; he kinda reminded me of a Disney’s Aladdin with the way he did that. I was expecting to hate this guy, but I didn’t, so that really surprised me.
Of course, I ended up really liking the Autobots, but that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Another big plus about this movie was the special effects. I thought all the CG was really well done. There wasn’t once where I was totally distracted by the thought of “Man, that looks so fake.” The live action and CG stuff was put together seamlessly. Despite their somewhat ridiculous designs, the Transformers looked pretty gosh-darn good. I could tell the Autobots apart from each other fairly easily, while the Decepticons I had to depend on what vehicle they originally were. Even with Michael Bay’s vomit vision, I enjoyed the action sequences with Transformers, which of course had tons of explosions and destruction. Unfortunately, aside from the climax, these action scenes were spaced pretty far apart, cushioned with crappy story and human scenes. Yes, that’s right, I wanted MORE action sequences. And I’m not sure why, but they decided to use the Autobots for comic relief. In one scene, the Autobots are trying to hide from Sam’s parents. Instead of, you know, TRANSFORMING, they wander around his backyard, breaking garden decorations and ruining lawns, hiding on roofs and in porches. As entertaining as this is, I don’t remember the Autobots ever being retarded.
And while the Autobots get a pretty in-depth introduction, you don’t really get to see much of them. You’ve got Optimus Prime the Leader, Bumblebee the Lovable One, Jazz the Homie-G, Ratchet the Healer, and Ironhide the Weapons Dude. I think we see Optimus Prime fight the most, which is good, and Bumblebee gets into some fights as the main character’s robot. But we barely get to see the other three fight. Ratchet doesn’t do jack healing, Jazz is useless, and after showing off Ironhide’s awesome weapon arsenal in several scenes, he never uses any of them! The rest of the robot time is Decepticons wreaking havok on the humans. Major lame sauce. Oh, they also had some stupid little boombox spider robot that wasted a lot of screen time also. Whoopie, it throws ninja stars. And who fights the little bugger? Why, the useless hackers, cliched moronic super secret military base guy, and the Secretary of Defense Voight. Stupid.
Seriously, aside from the main character, what was the point of having the all these humans around to do anything except die? One branch of the movie follows these group of soldiers who make it from a Middle Eastern desert all the way to the urban metropolis where the climax of the movie occurs. And they’re fighting in the climax or something. Which is totally pointless, because we already know from watching them throughout the entire movie that their weapons are useless. There’s a couple of intense battle scenes of them basically doing nothing. But they’re doing nothing with lotsa large guns and explosions, which I guess is the important part? I mean, the film is almost 2 and a half hours, and it really shouldn’t have been more than 90 minutes. The hackers were pointless, nobody cares that main soldier has a wife and kid, and we already know the government is incompetent. Kelvin (who considers it a 2-star movie) says he can probably edit it to be a 3-star movie.
Okay, that was a pretty unorganized review. Summary: Get rid of every human-only scene (except for scenes that focus on Sam Witwicky) and get-rid of the boombox spider robot scenes, and you’ll have a decent mindless summer action flick. I still think it’s pretty entertaining, even with all the fluff. I think the Transformers movie was a good platform for Michael Bay to do all his excessive special effects crap; too bad he had to rape the fond childhood memories of twenty-somethings everywhere in the process. Oh, and I liked this more than 300. 6.3/10
While you’re at it, watch something with a better robot-time ratio:
Dancing robots = awesome. There’s also an ice skating one. You can check out the full commericals at the Citroen C4 site.
And FYI to folks that don’t know, I’m taking time off from work to do nothing, so I won’t be back until next Tuesday. And if you see my car in the lot, don’t worry; I’m not actually at work :P (but I do need to go get my car.)
