I believe that when you spend money to see these types of movies you are contributing to the lack of creativity in American film making. Not that the people who support these movies care about creative film making.
My understanding is that Michael Bay is very good at making Michael Bay movies. His movies are the kind of fun, mindless action extravaganza that is easy to sell to foreign markets because you don’t need to understand English very well and you don’t need to pay attention to a complicated plot. Cars and trucks turn into flying, fighting robots! Strong hero, pretty girl, let’s do this!
Saw Marky Mark promoing this on Letterman the other day. They showed a clip. It was horrible. Should have been left on the cutting room floor, let alone left in the movie, let alone used to promote the movie.
(The clip was Marky Mark showing two others that he thought he had found a broken down Transformer.)
Almost all bad movies can have a good trailer and certainly a good clip. This one is going to stink big time.
I have tickets purchased for an IMAX screening tomorrow afternoon. I’m sure it will be awful, but at least it was my fiance’s money, not mine.
I’m looking forward to the Dinobots and a nap.
No, he’s shit at that. The Fast and the Furious franchise is good mindless action. I haven’t seen Pain and Gain or the Island (judging by the reviews I didn’t miss anything) but everything else he’s done is god awful.
Thought this was fitting: The Half in the Bag guys watch the first three Transformers movies at once.
Had a free ticket to a sneak preview last week.
Decided it wasn’t worth the drive.
I never bothered with anyone, because I think that they do a lousy job as toy commercials.
Let me explain. The toys were really cool, because they incorporated all of these clever little mechanisms for re-arranging the parts so that the parts of a car or whatever would become the parts for a robot. Most of the fun in playing with them was in working these mechanisms to transform them. Stories about the robots were strictly secondary, because the fun was in the toys themselves.
In the old cartoons (and animated movies), we got to see them going through those complicated and clever motions on screen. There were stories, too, but they were really just an excuse to show off the neat toys. I don’t remember if the stories were actually any good, but it really didn’t matter.
In the new movies, the transformation sequence looks like an explosion that goes partway and then reverses, and the robots look like animated scrap heaps, not like something that actually turns into a car. There’s no way you’d be able to make a toy based on the movie appearances that actually transformed, which defeats the entire purpose.
I watched the first one at my wife’s suggestion. I thought it was okay, but the action scenes were incoherent in parts.
I watched the second one at my wife’s suggestion. We didn’t like it; the action scenes were almost completely incoherent.
I watched the third one at my wife’s suggestion, even after I reminded her that she didn’t like the second one. We didn’t like it, for the same reasons.
Here’s hoping my wife hasn’t forgotten the last two.
No, no we didn’t. Not in any way, shape, or form.
In very, very few cases, mostly in the initial miniseries, did the on-screen transformations match the toys transformations. 90+% of the time, arms or heads would simply grow out of bodies (in ways the toys parts couldn’t even move, let alone how they do move in the actual transformations), wheels (or other bits of kibble the character designers didn’t want to deal with*) would simply disappear going into bot mode, and reappear when they changed back, they’d ignore when someone had to turn at the waist and just have their feet flip between frames, legs would extend on characters whose toys legs didn’t extend (to make the cartoon bot-mode less chunky and brick-like than the toy), or they’d make up transformations wholesale, because it was easier for the animators. And parts never came off to move them, even though they frequently did with the toys (especially the early ones).
And this is when the character designs actually resemble the actual toys, not early design ideas (one of Broadside’s two completely different character designs), or based on mistaken interpretations of photographs (Combaticons), or altered to remove unfortunate or awkward parts locations (Megatron), or to make the character look more human (Ironhide and Ratchet), or to make their alt-mode look more real (Blitzwing’s jet mode), or to avoid copyright issues with toys based on properties not owned by Takara (Jetfire/Skyfire), or just plain mistakes on the animator’s parts.
- And this rarely happened with parts that actually have to be removed and put aside, like the Seekers’ fists, or Combiner Kibble, just stuff like wheels, or parts that become ‘backpacks’ - typically stuff like beast-mode heads, car-mode front ends, and jet-mode cockpits - or parts that become bases (Prime’s trailer, Ironhide and Ratchet’s whole passenger compartments post-MTMtE)… The sole exception seems to be weapons that didn’t form part of the alt-mode.
And calling most G1 toy transformations ‘clever’ is…pushing it. A few - Megatron, Prowl, Jazz, the Seekers, some of the Powermasters, the human-form cassettes - had fairly clever transformations, but most - pull or flip out the legs, pull of flip out the arms, pull or flip out the head, or flip back a bit of the alt-mode to reveal it, then put on bits and pieces that just sit in your toybox until it’s time to transform them into robot mode - weapons for most, fists for a lot, Combiner Kibble if you were building a gestalt. The most variation was whether the front end or the back end formed the legs.
New toys, now…they have clever (occasionally too clever by half, especially in the Movie-verse lines) transformations, save in sublines that don’t transform, or have deliberately simplified transformations.
My Transformers-loving friend gave it a very enthusiastic thumbs-down, and gained an abiding hatred for Michael Bay.
Theatergoer beware.
OK, like I said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the cartoons, so I stand corrected.
And some of the toys weren’t very clever, but others were. IIRC, Starscream was almost like one of those puzzles where you have to slide this piece to unblock that other one (though I never had him, much though I would have liked to, so I couldn’t play much with him). And then there were the ones that had multiple different alt-forms.
Starscream’s one of the Seekers - AKA the Decepticon Jets, who did have a clever little trick with the cockpit/chest-nosecone/head-arms interaction, where you’d push the nose through the body, forcing the arms outward, then move it up to become the head. Then you’d stick the fists on, so they weren’t the best example of G1’s engineering…just one of the more clever parts.
I’ll be there with my son Tuesday.
We’re conniseurs of mindless entertainment.
It’s waaaaayyyyy too long, and the actress playing Mark Wahlberg’s daughter makes Megan Fox and Rosie Huntingon-Whiteley look like Oscar winners. As usual, though, Stanley Tucci was awesome, and I’m in love with Bingbing Li. But no movie needs three heavy duty villains like Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer and Titus Welliver. Could the next movie star Li and Tucci and get rid of the kid fodder?
I have a question, though: How long would it take to drive from Beijing to Hong Kong?