Here is a link to a flaky local reviewer who goes by the name of Hanuman. He gives Transformers only two stars and then proceeds to trash it. But if you notice, he says almost nothing about the movie itself. He’s always going into these weird rants. It’s not uncommon for him to toss out several stars for a film just because a certain star is in it regardless of how good or bad it really is. And he absolutely loves Rob Schneider; he’ll rate any Rob Schneider film four or five stars easily.
I still think they should have done **Go Bots™: The Motion Picture ** instead.
Okay, we watched Transformers yesterday (Saturday), and the wife and I both give it a big thumbs up. It was great fun. I’m sure it helped that I’d never heard of Transformers before, which meant I could not be disappointed at any altering of the story line. Very nicely done.
On a side note, I’m curious now about Die Hard 4.0. I see there’s a thread on it now, but people seem to have seen it already. This link says that like Transformers, it will premier here in Thailand, next Thursday. Actually, it’s already showing here now, one show a night at 8pm since Thursday until it’s on for real from July 5. I left the Die Hard thread immediately as advised, because I did not want to see spoilers. We’ll watch the show next weekend. But curious if it’s showing now in the US?
Oh, and to add insult to injury, in addition to watching Transformers before any of you, we watched it at the Scala Theater, a big old-time movie palace in Siam Square. All tickets are 100 baht all the time. That works out to US$2.90 per ticket. We bought a couple cans of drink at the refreshment counter – we’d already had popcorn at the previous film – and so our grand total for seeing Transformers for both of us together – two tickets, two cans of drink – was $6.72. Hehehe. Just one of the many things I enjoy about living in Thailand. 
you sir are truly the luckiest man alive
I JUST SAW IT!! :eek: :eek:
Absolutely LOVED it, everything about it. Bay and Spielberg deserves blowjobs everyday for the rest of their lives for making this film.
I just got back from seeing too. My reactions are mixed. The first third of the movie does a great job of bringing the Transformers to life and creating an excellent mood with great military action scenes. Then it starts to get a little cheesy, the scenes last a little too long yet there isn’t much charater development to make us care about the characters, and the characters’ actions don’t make a lot of sense within the confusing framework of what plot there is.
My biggest beef: there are three female characters, one is a mom and the other two are impossibly gorgeous supermodels (even the computer geekette). Even the incidental female characters are supermodels. Evidently, in Michael Bay’s world, if you’re not gorgeous, you don’t exist. Even by blockbuster standards, it felt grating.
But the action sequences are very well done and exciting and the special effects are almost seamless. And the Transformers look very cool.
What I liked was that the script tried to play away from Michael Bay’s worst features. He loves his rah rah testosterone laden nonsense. At the end of Armageddon I cheered when Bruce Willis’s character died. During *Pearl Harbor * I began cheering for the Japanese to win the war. By playing this like a teen comedy with awesome special effects I think they avoided what could have been horrific.
And always great to see John Turturro hamming it up.
After I saw it on the weekend I predicted it would be the biggest grosser of the year.
I saw it last night and loved every second of it. It ain’t Shakespeare but it was big robots and even bigger explosions.
Michael Bay did a great job in making the movie “feel” like a Transformers movie. It also helped that they liberally sprinkled in quotes from the 1986 movie. If only they could have added “The Touch” and it would have been perfect.
When I saw the original movie in the theater, I cried when Optimus died and passed on The Matrix. I saw it with my best friend way back then. And last night, that same friend and I saw the live action one.
I loved it. I thought it was great and brilliant and wonderful. My only complaints are that Optimus didn’t have his face shield, but then the face shield popped up for like… I dunno, 5 seconds? For those 5 seconds, I was like a 7 year old again, watching the original movie. Then it went back down, and it totally confused me.
And they could have thrown in a reference to Energon cubes.
And Devastator was kind of lame compared to how much he rocked in the cartoon.
What about George Plimpton?
:dubious: <- Me after reading this, but both eyebrows went up.
Devastator can never be lame, he’s fuckin’ Devastator.
We just got back from this and loved it, too. We didn’t even know it was opening today; I just checked the showings to see what was playing, and it was between this and Die Hard 4. It literally came down to a dice roll. The only real wish I had, was that they had pulled back away from the fight scenes so you could see more of what was actually going on with the robots fighting. The up close stuff was confusing.
The audience cheered when Bumblebee turned into that sweet new Camaro.
Just got back from it. Overall, it was a fun ride.
[minor gripe] Have to admit, the whole teen genius thing is getting annoying. Shia LaBeouf’s character I could buy; even Megan Fox’s. But Rachael Taylor’s character? A fresh-out of high school Signal Processor? Sorry, but the magical teen hero who has some strange ability to understand seriously advanced (and often tedious) maths is wearing thin. I could almost have bought it if she was introduced as an oddity - something different, but the comment that NSA is hiring straight from High School? Wha??? If she was that bright, she would never have finished HS and would have gone to college while normal kids are in HS. That I could buy; I’ve seen that.[/m g]
I do have some other little beefs, but I’ll wait and see how other folks felt.
The wrap-up: You don’t go on a roller coaster to marvel at how well the walls are painted.
Love John Turturro. Don’t see enough of him. ('Course, I don’t think he couldn’t ever play a “normal” person - he has too much fun with the strange ones.)
BTW Megan Fox may be my new crush - goDAAAAAMN!
Saw it today. I have never seen the original Transformers so I had no expectations or preconceptions. I thought it was great. Actually, at one point I thought it was awesome then my theater had a power outage and we lost several minutes of the film TWICE near the end (you’re damn right we got a free movie pass). So it kind of spoiled it for me. Still I thought it was fun, there was humor, giant robots, shit blowing up, there was something for everyone.
Okay, there was a little cheese but the shit blowing up makes up for it.
Well yeah, but in the original cartoon Devastator was all the Constructicons combined, so he was like 3 times as big as anyone else, and his arms were freaking cranes and backhoes and shit! It was rad as hell! In the movie, Devastator is just a bulldozer. Kinda lame.
I saw the thing tonight - I treated my dad and brother, who wanted to go. Is it me, or for a movie about giant robots fighting, did this movie actually not have that much giant robot fighting? I thought that was odd.
So, I take it I’m the only one out there who was much more entertained by Die Hard 4 and Ocean’s 13? Maybe I was having an off day…maybe it was because I hadn’t had lunch and saw a 3:30pm showing. Maybe it was because the girl two seats down from me kept talking to her boyfriend in Spanish…loudly.
It was okay to see once for me, and was better than Spiderman 3, but have already seen several things this summer that I felt were much more engrossing.
I probably would have been if I’d seen them. 
Well played. 
I have seen an inordinate number of movies in the past two weeks: Ocean’s 13, 1408, Spiderman 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hostel 2, Live Free or Die Hard. About three per weekend. Argh. Now tack on Transformers.