Transmorphers (Spoilers, But You WON'T Care)

Cafe Society
1

Oh, what a deliciously crappy movie this is! “In 2009 we discover life on another planet 20 million lightyears from Earth. We sent them a message. Five years later they replied.” Comedy gold, Jerry!

The acting is priceless. It seems like in every scene there’s a few people who can act (a bit), but there’s always someone who just flunked out of the William Shatner School of Bad Acting and . . . . Inappropriate Pauses for No . . . . Apparent Reason. Thankfully, most of the female leads were cast based on their looks, so you don’t really mind when the dredlocked officer says, “You don’t fear his failures. . . . You fear his success!” as she’s so cute when she shakes her head like a bobblehead.

The directing is just amazing. The camera points at a blank wall, ignoring the actors who’re doing something off-screen, or cuts of parts of the scene for no explicable reason. Not to mention the sudden splitscreens for no apparent reason.

Hmm. Given the ratio of females to males in this movie (something like 10:1), I’m thinking that the casting couch was employed.

So far, they’ve stolen from Transformers, Demolition Man, Scanners, Terminator, and Alien. Of course, this isn’t done with a seamless transition. Nope. They just follow one plotline along (that they’ve stolen), then suddenly shoot off in another direction.

Oh yeah, a brilliant point in the film is when the thawed out traitor (he was supposed to be frozen for 100 years, but even though they “don’t normally thaw people out,” they gave him a pardon so he could lead the super impossible mission to defeat the alien robots) is abruptly told to leave his ex-girlfriend alone as she’s now married (To a woman!). Naturally, the next scene is of the traitor in his room when his ex shows up to visit him. They have a pretty pointless conversation (though her marriage is mentioned briefly), and as she goes to leave they make the “Yeah, it’s kind of weird the way things are, but that’s how they are, and at some point events will conspire to bring us back together, but until then, we both have to pretend that we don’t have any feelings for one another.” speech. I kept hoping that as the ex was walking out, the traitor would shout, “So, there’s no chance of a three-way with us and the general, then?” (the ex is married to a general who looks to be maybe 30), sadly, they didn’t do that.

Even better, the traitor has dreams of the Earth being attacked, which would have happened about 400 years before he was born.

Oh yeah, in the scene where the traitor gives his “dramatic” speech with the “once more into the breech” undertones, keep an eye on the folks in the background. You’ll see a bleached blond gal with a really bad haircut (or wig) wearing a very lowcut silver looking leotard. It’s a pretty stark contrast compared to everyone else who’s either in a dark shirt or leather jacket. They also ripoff ID4 in the scene. (I keep hoping a “womp rat” reference will show up.)

2

Oh yeah, blondie doesn’t say anything in that scene. Just stands there looking pretty. (Good casting for that part, I must say.)

And, as I predicted, the ex shows up and volunteers for the mission, thus setting in motion the events which will lead for their eventual boinking. (Hopefully, we’ll get to see those sweater cows of hers, they’re quite impressive.)

Cat fight! W00t! A couple of the women (strangely, it seems the strike force leading the ID4 attack is composed entirely of women, not a nerdy guy and his wisecracking ethnic friend) come back to the barracks and discover that the other women in the group (can’t be a platoon, since all of them are officers [just like Star Trek]) are raiding their stuff (since they “won’t be coming back from the mission”) and a cat fight breaks out. I wonder if there’s some cooking oil in their quarters which will get broken and promptly spewed all over the combatants?

Aww, no oil, just a bunch of weird camera angles so you can’t see just how badly they can fake throwing a punch (and no blood, either, even though there a couple of really nasty nose blows). Now I’m getting a lecture on military ethics. Boring!

3

Hey, blondie’s got a new 'doo, and it turns out she’s an android! Hmm, maybe a little sexbot action is in our future! (Which would explain how the aliens were able to invade Earth. Billy was obviously playing with his Monroebot, rather than out there delivering newspapers like he’s supposed to.)

Oh, Christ! Now, the lesbians are having a tearjerking goodbye. Damn! They started to have this tearful embrace with some kissing and we immediately cut to another scene! Why don’t they give us a little hot lesbian love? It’d make up for the painful scene of the general whining about losing her spouse.

So now they go on the assault (in order to capture an alien bot so they can upload the ID4 virus into it) and all but a few of the team members are wearing swim goggles for some inexplicable reason (I guess there wasn’t enough money in the budget for everyone to get them).

Ooh! Combat! Incomprehensible camera angles! Weapons that constantly recoil but only occassionally fire a shot! Right in the middle of combat one of the soldiers shouts, “We need an escape route!” Gee, doncha think you should have planned for that before you went into combat?

4

Oooh! They’ve got deadly frisbees just like in Tron! Well, not exactly like in Tron, these are glow-in-the-dark (rather than being white ones painted with concentric circles like in Tron) and they fly in crazy figure-8s before hitting their targets and blowing them up.

So now, we’ve got two women, hunkered down and apparently firing and dodging blaster fire, except it seems like they didn’t bother to insert that. So the women are just pushing the sides of their guns for the hell of it, and twitching.

“We always figured the machines were created by an alien race, but they are the alien race!” Said by the guy who’s cracked open an alien to implant the ID4 virus. Somebody want to explain to me the logic in them knowing how to create a virus for a computer system they never studied? I mean, this is a society which hasn’t even figured out how to do oil wrestling and they’re supposed to be so sophisticated that they can infect an completely unknown computer system? Come on!

Dumbest scene in cinematic history! They’re apparently trying to lure the flying bots into a circle so that they’ll shoot one another, but from the way the scene’s put together, you just hve the traitor and a member of the squad sitting on the ground, ducking non-existant weapons fire, while the flying bots are perched on hunks of concrete directly above them with an amazingly clear shot. This isn’t Star Wars stormtroopers missing the shot, this is Don Knotts The Shakiest Gun in the West missing the shot! :smack:

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To be fair, they did actually get this bit right in ID4 - despite lots of people saying things like the above (about ID4). Jeff Goldblum’s character reverse engineers their communications protocols, enabling him to create the virus (although actually, it’s more of a DoS attack, IIRC).

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They weren’t able to upload the virus in the field, so they haul the robot (even though they know it’s got a tracking device) back to their underground base, which the aliens can’t find, because apparently they don’t know what radar is (the humans use radar to monitor the locations of the bots).

Aw, snap! They just ripped off Harlan Ellison’s The Demon With the Glass Hand! Does Harlan know about this? 'Cause I’m thinking there should be some lawyerbots showing up at the producer/writer/director/actor’s house right about now, if Harlan does know about this.

ROTFLMAO! Okay, so the traitorbot agrees to get the virus uploaded into himself, so that he can destroy the alienbots. There’s a tight closeup of his face as he agrees to this, and you can tell that he’s got about 3 days worth of stubble on his face. When he lays down to have the virus implanted in him (since it’s encased in a fuel cell), he’s clean shaven! (The robots are pounding at the gates of your underground city and you let the guy shave?) Even better, however, is when you see the shot of him with his chest popped open, you can tell that it’s simply an oval piece of paper that they’re using to composit (very poorly, I might add) a glowing green circuit board. :stuck_out_tongue:

7

True, but expecting a Mac to be able to interface with an alien computer system is a bit much.

This film just keeps getting dumber and dumber! The humans, realizing that they’re fucked, immediately get into an argument as to whether or not they should launch an all out attack on the bots. What the alternative to the all out attack is, nobody says.

Traitorbot convinces the scientist with the sexbot to come on the mission with him and to bring the sexbot along. Why? I have no idea. How they’re going to get to the [del]mothership[/del] alien tower is by strapping themselves into a cargo container which is hooked up to a fighter that will only be able to carry them part of the way. Does anybody see why this might be a bad idea?

They climb into the cargo container (Hmm, does this count as a Wrath of Khan rip-off?) and traitorbot starts to hand the scientist a gun. The scientist shakes his head, saying, “Oh no, no, no, no.” Traitorbot hands it to him saying, “Oh, you will.” At first, I thought, “That’s pretty dumb handing a weapon to someone who doesn’t know how to use it.” Then I remembered that three quarters of the time they don’t work anyway, so what’s it matter? :smiley:

So the pilots of these futuristic fighters don’t need helmets, pressure suits or oxygen masks, but they do need swim goggles. Interesting.

8

I think that’s dealt with as well - I mean, I’m not saying it’s plausible, any of it, but the popular myth is that ID4 just ignores issues of compatibility etc, when it doesn’t.

9

The lesbian general’s trying to talk to someone as she leads the assault on the attacking bots, but I can’t hear what their response to her is over the music. The ground troops around her begin to fire on the approaching mechs. The general then orders them to do exactly that (and the mistake was clearly done when they mixed down the audio).

Holy crap! The fighter pilot tells traitorbot that she’s got to drop them, and traitorbot’s best buddy (who’s in the cargo container with him) points to the back of the container and says, “We take these!” “These” are flying skybikes, ala, well, I don’t know, really. Haven’t quite seen anything floating in a container before, but no doubt the idea came from Return of the Jedi and Galactica 1980. (Oh yeah, nobody knows how to fly them, and sexbot’s got a new 'doo.) Ed Wood be proud of the way this guy wrote himself out of the corner!

Skybikes ae straight of Jedi in design, except they sound just like an ordinary motorcycle and despite being thousands of feet in the air, flying at night and in the rain, the characters are dry and can clearly hear one another shout comments.

Hey! the fighters have “cowboy guns!” You know, one shot blows up six bad guys! Sweet! I didn’t know they still made those things!

400 years of nothing but night and rain, and the Peterbuilt trucks survive! That, my friends, is one tough truck.

Aww, the lesbian chick just bought the farm! At least I thing she did. She ran out in front of the bots, pointed her weapon at them, made “ptew!” “ptew!” noises, they transmorphed and produced some massive rocket launchers, then the camera cut away to her friend (who was supposed to be covering her, BTW), there’s an explosion at what appears to be about 2 feet below the rock she’s hiding behind, then a couple of seconds later she says “Noooo.” turns away for a second and then turns back, making “ptew!” “ptew!” noises.

10

They mention that they’d been studying the ship for years, but then say they hadn’t been able to figure anything out about it until right before the aliens show up. So they address part of the issue, but not in any really meaningful way.

Shocking reveal! The lesbian chick’s alive! She pops out from behind a hunk of concrete, shortly after traitorbot shows up and finds out she’s dead. So, are we going to get the touching [del]Leia[/del] lesbian saying to [del]Han[/del] traitorbot “I love you.” with him responding “I know.” just as he lowers himself into the central data computer in the [del]mothership[/del] alien tower?

You remember the old arcade game Star Castle? The radar screen they use to monitor the bots moving towards the city looks like that. Interestingly enough, they use the same shot of the radar all through the film no matter what the dialog says is on the screen! Given that the CGI work in the film actually looks damned good (really, it does), I can’t imagine that they couldn’t kick a couple of bucks or a few extra Dr. Peppers and Funions to the guys in the CGI department to get them to come up with a radar display that looked a little better. I bring this up, because the radar operator has just announced for the third time in the film that the bots “have breached all perimeters!”

Okay, okay, the matting work as they scurry into the [del]mothership[/del] alien tower is some of the worst I’ve ever seen! It makes the original Land of the Lost look like freakin’ LOTR by comparison!

Aaand the [del]mothership[/del] alien tower just started to transmorph! Wow! Who couldn’t see that coming!

11

“They’ve breached all perimeters.” Again. (That’d make a good drinking game for this flick, I think.)

Aww, lesbian chick just found out that traitorbot’s a bot. She’s crushed, but she realizes that it’s the only way for them to survive, since they’re pinned down in the [del]mothership[/del] alien tower and it turns out that the defenses are cued to the presence of humans. I gotta say, though, with the swim goggles on, traitorbot kinda looks like Bono in this scene. Traitorbot says, “Know that I’ve always loved you and that I always will.” Lesbian chick sobs in his arms. Can we get a “I have and always shall be, your friend.”? Nope. Lesbian chick just says, “I’m sorry. So sorry,” Lame!

Okay, so traitorbot wanders into the central core, and I was hoping for a 2001 riff, but no such luck. Instead, he goes into this glowing blue phonebooth, puts his hands uo the walls and begins flexing back and forth with a grimace on his face. The humans are about to target the [del]mothership[/del] with their most powerful weapon (emags), which looks suspiciously similar to the shield generator on Endor, when suddenly the bots start falling over and shutting down. I guess this is because they knew the damn super weapon wasn’t going to work.

Despite the predictions made earlier in the film, traitorbot survives the glowing blue phonebooth of death! Oh. Wait. No, he didn’t. The lesbians do have a brief, touching reunion, then we get fireworks ala the ending of Jedi. We gonna see traitorbot n a funeral pyre? Nope. Just shots of the women seductively taking off their swim goggles and shaking their heads as the sun comes. I kept waiting to see if the McKenzie brothers were going to land in their van, but the credits started rolling. Bummer. I was hoping for some boobage. There doesn’t seem to be a trailer for this turd on youtube, but can watch the big cat fight. (It’s worth it, guys, trust me.)

12

I can’t get past your first line without my brain leaking out of my ears.

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I know, its like it was written by the Shakespeare of stupid!

14

And I know just what your next film should be.
Or possibly Monster, or The Da Vinci Treasure, or Pirates of Treasure Island, or …

Oh and according to Transmorphers, in the future hot women are made of wood. They sounded like it in that fight. Thump thump!

15

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that at the video store and almost rented it. Thanks for the play by play so I know I now HAVE to get it.