There were about 14 minutes of good surrounded by 130 minutes of groan-inducing dialogue (“one shall stand, one shall fall!”), cliched plot points (the hot girl ditches the insensitive jock for the smart, sensitive but insecure nerd! Parents misunderstand everything! Sure, we’ll let the civilians into top-secret government operations just because they insist on it!), WAY over-the-top acting (the Sector 7 guy was the worst), totally nonsensical elements (40-foot tall robots basically dancing around in the open, shaking the ground and so forth and half the time NO ONE NOTICES THEM?? What the hell?? Bumblebee all of a sudden can talk? Why? How? The entire city is being blown up, and yet MORE AND MORE CIVILIANS ARE DRIVING AROUND RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL), Lucasian levels of annoying characters (Frenzy annoyed the hell out of me IMMEDIATELY, incorporating the most annoying elements of Ewoks and Jar-Jar and battle droids from Episode 1 and gawd knows what else was ever annoying about Star Wars into one AMAZINGLY annoying character that got MORE SCREEN TIME than just about any of the other characters), nonstop slapstick humor from the Autobots (ha, look, they keep trying to hide, they don’t understand humans, they keep inadvertantly wrecking the yard, all they need now is to have one slip on a banana peel ha ha no), a totally unbelievable love story that ends on a totally creepy note (they end up making out ON THE HOOD OF THE ROBOT CAR WHILE ALL THE OTHER SENTIENT ROBOTS ARE AROUND WATCHING!), action that 90% was so confusing (and shaky-cammed) that you had to wait for the fights to be over to try to figure out who was even fighting let alone who won coupled with robot designs that were so overly complicated that they could literally have flung a giant magnet into a scrap heap and come up with something with more character, the movie made me TIRED…OK, I’ll stop now. No, wait! I forgot, ALL OF OUR TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN REVERSE-ENGINEERED FROM ALIEN TECHNOLOGY THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS KEPT SECRET FOR DECADES! coughcoughID4coughcough OK, NOW I’m done…
The good parts:
[ul]
[li] Michael Bay casts hot babes in his movies. Megan Fox is hot. There’s a random screaming hot girl with nice cleavage that one of the robots flies over in slow motion as the camera gets a good shot of her tits before she screams, which is almost like a sideways homage to the scene in Street Trash where the girl jumps over the decapitated head in slo-mo. I’m disappointed that Michael Bay couldn’t come up with a scenario in which Megan Fox had to strip to her underwear and get wet and make out with that random hot girl I mentioned before. I mean, come on, Mike! You never let a lack of reasons or logic stop you before![/li]
[li] Some of the transformation and battle scenes were cool.[/li]
[li] The temperature in the theater was OK, and no one kicked my seat or anything like that.[/li]
[li] Megan Fox is hot. Wait, I said that already. Well, she still is.[/li][/ul]
If for some reason Bay had cast someone less hot like Tea Leoni or something like that, I would give a NEGATIVE RATING. I have to give at least one star for Megan Fox and the occasionally cool transformation and battle scenes. OK, I’ll grant that the scenes of Bumblebee helping Sam get into Megan Fox’s pants were kind of funny. But it’s not worth another star.
Most of the groan inducing dialogue was an homage to the hard core cartoon fans. “one shall stand…” for instance is from the original animated movie. I believe because Bumblebee held the all spark it healed him(that’s the impression I got). I loved how over the top the Sector7 guys were…I thought it was to show that they thought they were so self important and righteous and above everyone else. None of those 3 things bugged me.
There should have been more development of the robot personalities though. We never really get to see the Megatron/Starscream feud develop. I thought Optimus was a little too much of a wussified version, especially given the long, drawn out "honor’ speeches.
Why in the hell would they sink the destroyed transformers? Gee, I wonder what decepticon will find Megatron and bring him back in TF2.
I hope, since we got to develop the humans around the story so much this time, that TF2 will focus more on the robots.
-I’ve only watched it on Stage6, so I haven’t gotten the full theater experience yet
Well, I have to throw in my vote. I took my husband to see this movie last night for our date night… I’m 22, he’s 23. He loved Transformers from childhood (I don’t know how much ORIGINAL Transformers stuff he knows or adheres to) and I barely recognize them because my brother had some toys that neither of us could ever successfully transform into another shape. I basically went into this movie thinking that i would “grin and bear it” for my husband’s sake…
…And it rocked so freakin’ hard. I would go see it again tonight, except we’re so poor it hurt our budget to see it the first time. I’m not gonna lie, there were definitely strong elements of “Just relax, it’s only a movie”, but once I relaxed I was in heaven. I thought the writing was great, the visuals were excellent (we saw the digital projection version, which was nice), and I was bowled over by Shia laBoeuf. I want him to be in every movie I see from now on. Seriously, I thought he did an incredible job. And yes, the female characters were ridiculously hot, but at least they were smart, and not “Oh my god, eeeeek, aliens, save me rescue me!!” Oh, and my husband LOVED that they used (at least one of) the original voice(s).
I really liked how for once the military wasn’t entirely useless against the alien invaders like every other movie of this kind. Actually i think they could have defeated the Decepticons without Autobot help if it came to it.
One thing that really disturbed me about the movie is that they were wrong about who had the Hoover Dam built. It was FDR, not Herbert Hoover. I spent the rest of the movie thinking, “What the hell? The writers must know who built it, so they must have thought it improved the story somehow.”
Then my mind would go around and around trying to think of a way that Hoover building the dam would enhance the story, pretty unsuccessfully I might add. I can buy a movie about flying giant robots, but the Hoover Dam thing took me out of the movie. Is there something wrong with me?
Probably because of the name, because the average person might be confused as to why Franklin Roosevelt had a dam built named after his predecessor. Although looking at it now, I like the possibility of the real reason Hoover did nothing to help America get out of the Depression was because he was so busy on his Secret Robot-Covering Dam Building Project. He couldn’t tell anyone what he was doing, so people thought he was just doing nothing! Sounds like an Oliver Stone movie.
I finally saw it last night. Several people at work just absolutely raved about it, which may have been part of the problem.
My evaluation: a definite meh.
Now, I love action adventure flicks with giant creatures and stuff blowing up real good, so I was prepared to accept it on that level. And the action sequences were very entertaining.
However:
The movie started great. The whole attack on the Air Force Base was well done; in fact, both desert sequences were entertaining. The problem for me was that, after those scenes, the rest of the film’s intelligence level dropped perceptibly.
Was this possibly the worst screenplay in action-movie history? I know, dialog isn’t a high priority in action films, but several times I found myself thinking, “Jeez, STFU and blow something up, already!” I saw Live Free or Die Hard a couple of weeks ago, and while it was obviously no Citizen Kane , the script kept me interested. This was just painful ! (Note to Mike Nelson et al: You might want to consider this for one of your future Film Crew projects!)
Sensory overload. I had a hard time following some of the battle scenes because there was just too much going on! In the final scene, especially–I had the feeling Bay just decided to throw everything he had at the audience. It lacked the focus of the earlier scenes.
Believe me, when I walked in, I didn’t have my sights set particularly high, and I still left disappointed.
We finally saw this last night, and I will just say a very hearty WORD to everything want2know has said above, except for rather than “meh”, I’d have to go with “bloody awful”.
Good lord, that was the closest I’ve come to walking out of a movie in years. Which is really, really a shame, because as said above, it started out fantastic and could have been one hell of a movie if it had chosen to stay on the darker path rather than turning into a stupid farce with peeing robots hiding around some dumb teenager’s house and cracking stupid one-liners (which yes, I realize full well the one-liners are in the spirit of the old show, but I was really hoping for something a little more modern and mature…and yes, I realize how stupid that sounds when talking about a movie about giant transforming fighting robots made from a children’s cartoon, but there you go).
I just remember seeing the preview and thinking “Man, this is going to kick ass!” And then last night, about three thousand years into the big climatic fight at the end, thinking how could it be possible to make said movie about giant transforming fighting robots so boring?! And the Crazy!Lighting fast!Jerky!Fight scenes! I have no idea what was going on through most of the film, or who was fighting who, or who was winning. And Optimus Prime couldn’t bring himself to knock off five or six baddies to save Bumblebee, but had no problem taking out 3/4 of a city and killing probably hundreds of innocent people? And the eBay plugs! And the super-slo-mo shots of the different car models, and product placement! Hummer! Camaro! Porsche! Mountain Dew! X Box!
Good grief.
I will, however, recommend that everyone see this in the theater, because there will be NO POINT whatsoever in renting it and watching it on a wee television screen once it’s out on video. Big explosions and loud noises are about the only thing this movie has to offer, and you may as well make the most of them.
Megatron Imprinted the location of the allspark on the glasses, right?
So does that mean that the cube landed there, and the government built the dam around it, right?
Otherwise, the government would have moved the cube to the hoover dam, and hid it there, in which case Megatron would’nt have been able to imprint any directions on the glasses, in case he’s clairvoyant. And clairvoyant robots… thats just pushing it, frankly.
Have you ever actually seen the original cartoon? Or, more importantly, have you seen it as an adult? Because the jokes and one-liners in the movie are about a million times more modern and mature, and a billion times less groan-inducing, than the jokes in the G1 cartoon. In fact, the dialog on the original cartoons makes them damn near unwatchable…it’s really horrendous.
Let me give and example of how cheesy and awful the original cartoon was. Just the other day, I saw some of a first season G1 cartoon, and in it Jazz got hit by a snowball and exclaimed “That’s snow fun!” My Bad Pun Meter[sup]TM[/sup] went off the fuckin’ scale. That was immediately followed by Spike rolling down a hill and becoming a cartoon cliché giant tumbling snowball. Is this really the standard we should be holding ourselves to?
Every time I hear someone (not NailBunny in particular) wax nostalgic and say they wish the movie were more like the cartoon, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. I loved the cartoons when I was 8; and I still think they’re cool in an ancient-pop-culture-historical-curiosity kind of way. But I also see them now and think, “How could anyone take this seriously?” For example, (from that same episode), did you know that if you use a giant crystal buried under the North Pole to extract the heat from the Earth’s core (stealing to fill Energon cubes, of course), the whole surface of the planet will freeze? And overnight, too!
Fact is, the movie did pay homage to the original cartoon in some nice subtle ways, and lots of not-so-subtle ways. But it took the story line and dialog and gave them a much needed update for more sophisticated, grown up audiences. Yeah, Bumblebee peed on Agent Simmons. Get over it…if that’s the cheesiest thing in the movie, it’s still infinitely less cheesy than any five minute stretch of the first cartoon.
Thank g-d for shaky fight scenes. I can’t wait until action movies are just a 90 minute blur punctuated by scenes of Anthony Anderson and Chris Tucker making horrible puns.
Finally saw this last night. I thought it was horrible. I didn’t think it was possible for a movie with giant robots, hot babes, and cool cars to bore me as much as this one did. It actually had me checking my watch several times to see how much longer I had to endure.
Yes, I watched and loved the cartoon when I was kid. Yes, I had the toys. No, I didn’t have an Optimus Prime figure. I wasn’t cool enough.
Thanks, odd guy. Next up we have “something that’s, like, soooo top secret!”. Gak to the dialogue. But funny in parts, needs more giant robots fucking shit up, Megan Fox* was hot, etc etc.
*Is she new? I don’t think i’d ever heard of her before this.
