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Huge TRANSFORMERS Journal
18 years ago
General
Aw, you've got flaws that you won't admit. Yet, you tell me it's a sin that I don't believe in...
Yet, you traded in your cross for a chance to dance with stars now, nothing is sacred.
I've given thought to leaving f-f-f-for sometime if only I could read a map.
Yet, you traded in your cross for a chance to dance with stars now, nothing is sacred.
I've given thought to leaving f-f-f-for sometime if only I could read a map.
SOURCE: http://www.paganomation.com/blog/?p=170
Boredom is the right of all sentient beings: a rambling, slightly biased Transformers film review (SPOILERS)
Now that I’ve seen the new Transformers movie, I feel like I just want to write a letter to those involved in the making of it to say thank you.
Yes, thank you for making this movie — without it, old school Transformers fans such as myself would not have all this great new G1 tie-in merchandise to buy. But next time, please, try to make a coherent cinematic experience that those of us who loved the old cartoon and comics would actually enjoy.
It is the year 2007…
The Transformers were introduced back in 1984, and so obviously there are some elements that had to be updated in order to bring a Transformers film into present day. And, as with all movies based on television shows or comics, it’s common for fans of the source material to be dissatisfied by default with the film adaptation. Often times, the movie will stray too far from the source, or will make changes to storylines or characters that die-hard fans simply cannot swallow. However, there’s a difference between making a lousy adaptation and making a lousy movie. And in the case of Michael Bay’s Transformers, I’m sorry to say that it’s the latter.
To say that I grew up with the Transformers would be kind of an understatement — Stan Bush’s “The Touch” was permanently ingrained into my DNA at an early age. And I’ll admit, a lot of what I find wrong with this film has to do with things from the old cartoon I wish they had put in. But an equal amount of the problems with “Transformers” come from both the characters and plot lines unique to this film, as well as the sheer stupidity with which some of these additions were made.
Arrested Development
Let’s start with the characters. The old cartoon was really good about setting up all of the characters from the very beginning — who they were, where they came from, and what they stood for. Sometimes this was done in less than subtle terms (ie Starscream’s vocal desire to replace Megatron as leader), but it was a cartoon, so that was okay. It was over an hour into this film before we even got to introducing the main robot characters, and honestly, that’s just ridiculous. A page could have been taken from the original TMNT movie — a successful film based on a cartoon — which made the suspense palatable in revealing the turtles to the audience, but didn’t overdo it to the point where you were like “where ARE they?!?”
Now, obviously, for a new audience to come into a Transformers movie knowing absolutely nothing, it makes sense to ground viewers with the human characters, to allow the audience to vicariously experience the awe of seeing cars and planes and whatnot turning into giant robots. But there must have been around twelve different core human characters, each with their own split-second setups and introductions, and none of whom (apart from Shia LeBeouf’s Sam Witwicky) you were inclined to become invested in. There just wasn’t enough time for proper character development for all of them. I swear some of them didn’t even have names (hacker girl, Spanish-speaking army guy, etc). And characters would appear and dissappear randomly from the story so much that I didn’t even really notice — I just didn’t care about them.
And the same could be said for the robot cast. The thing about Transformers is that it’s always been a character driven story. You may have watched just to see giant robots beating the crap out of each other, but each Transformer had a distinct personality. It was a cartoon, yes, but we actually cared when these characters went into battle — or when they died. Rather than making the audience become invested in the robot characters, the idea in the film seems to have been to go the “oooooh look giant robots lol” route.
Which meant that when Megatron rips Jazz (incidentally, voiced by Darius McCrary) into two pieces towards the end of the film, my reaction was less “OH HOLY CRAP JAZZ JUST DIED!” and more “oh. That one robot is now dead.” All of the secondary robots looked the same, had similar voices, and spent so little time standing still in robot mode that I honestly have no idea what 90% of them looked like. And Megatron — supposed to be this legendary badass — gets taken out in a flash by Sam and that cube thing. The all-powerful leader of the Decepticons has maybe 15 minutes of screen time and about six lines (remind me again why Frank Welker couldn’t POSSIBLY have provided his voice?)
Needless to say, the best character by far in this film is Optimus Prime. And even he was flawed — some of the things he did and said were just idiotic (hiding under a bridge rather than transforming, “My bad,” etc). Throughout the half of the film they were actually in, the Autobots were — how can I put this nicely? — retarded.
Dare To Be Stupid
It seemed like everyone in this film was an idiot. I say this without an ounce of irony or sarcasm in my voice. The Decepticons honestly didn’t have enough screen time to warrant mention here, but I couldn’t believe how many stupid moves the Autobots pulled off. Crashing into power lines, standing precariously close to the Witwicky’s home, and not even bothering to use their alternate modes! For crying out loud, they’re ROBOTS IN DISGUISE! Apparently, even though the Autobots learned enough from the World Wide Web to know how eBay works and to make stupid “hip” comments (Prime’s “my bad” and Jazz’s “little bitches” remark), they neither learned what power lines were nor how to appropriately fit in unnoticed in the humans’ world — which is THE ENTIRE POINT OF TRANSFORMERS.
Of the main humans, probably the only sane one in the entire movie is Sam Witwicky, which works — Shia LeBeouf really carries the majority of this film, and I tended to become disoriented whenever it would cut back to one of the other plotlines.
But let’s go down the list. The Witwickys seemed rather dense, with Kevin Dunn being well cast and having some good lines, but mostly blathering about his garden. He really seemed kind of underused, which is a shame, because I think he’s a good actor. The mother was a flat out moron, and I’m not even going to mention the “were you masturbating?” scene — something that should never, ever have appeared in a Transformers film. And how did neither of them notice giant robots standing outside their house? For that matter, how did no one else in the neighborhood notice? Sigh. And the appropriately named Megan Fox as Mikaela was really attractive, to say the least, but I found myself consistently rolling my eyes every time she opened her mouth.
There were also several characters that I found dumb solely based on the fact that their plotlines were useless. Hacker girl and Anthony Anderson? That whole side story about the virus? Get rid of it all. It added nothing, it was excruciating to watch, and in the end it just took away from the time that we could have been following Sam’s or the Transformer’s stories on-screen.
All the scenes with the whole “Sector 7″ team were equally unnecessary, though it gave the film some interest in that the giant killer robots from space weren’t the only threatening force in the mix. The one character who I actually thought had some potential was Agent Simmons, played by John Tuturro. The guy was an asshole of Walter Peck-ian proportions, and he played it well. But then what happens to him? Does he ever get the proverbial 50 gallons of marshmallow dumped on him? No idea. He just whines like a baby when that stupid cell phone thing starts attacking them in Hoover Dam, and then he disappears from the movie. And speaking of which…
The defense calls George Lucas
Why is it that films with CGI animation have become a breeding ground for Jar Jar humor? You know what I’m talking about — that asinine, overly childish cartoony humor that first popped up in the Star Wars Special Editions (Jawas falling off of big dinosaur things, robots dropping stuff, Sy Snootles saying “uh-oh!” when the Rancor is released, etc.) and was congealed into a single, despicable entity in the Phantom Menace in the form of Jar Jar Binks.
In any case, this movie has it’s own version, an irritating boom box that turns into a robot aboard Air Force One. The worst part is that, even after it’s decapitated early in the movie, it’s head survives to torment the characters (and the audience) almost until the end of the film. Why? Who cares. Stop, filmmakers. Stop putting these stupid characters into your films. No one finds them funny. Write some actual jokes next time.
Geez. Was there anything you DID like?
I will say this: Prime’s first transformation in the film was pretty badass. It was awesome to see a photorealistic truck transform into this huge robot. When the Autobots initially show up and transform for the first time — THAT was the best part of the movie for me. It was just so cool to see. I wish they had transformed more throughout the rest of movie! Or shown up, for that matter.
And unlike the old cartoon, the general human populace reacts to major destruction of their world at the hands of alien robots. So that lent an air of credibility to this film that the old series lacked.
There were also a few nice little touches that harkened back to the old series as well. There’s a VW beetle visible when Sam is buying Bumblebee, and there’s a scene where Sam is running from the Decepticon police car yelling “oh, shit.” Megatron yells at Starscream (who shows up randomly at some point), telling him that he’s failed him again. And Prime finally utters the quote from the packaging of his toy (”Freedom is the right of all sentient beings”), which was cool. But for the most part, these were too little too late.
I was hoping that if the film sucked, there would at least be some cool battles between giant transforming robots. The problem with a lot of the Tranformer battle scenes, though, was they were done in that soon-to-be-hackneyed handheld shaky-camera style. The design of the robots in this film, as I’ve said before, are kind of like a bunch of tiny bits of metal glued together, unlike the boxy robots of the old series. So for the most part, you’re basically seeing blurry chunks of metal rolling around at high speed. Not exactly epic. A few more wide shots would have been nice, to show more detail of the fights and to get a better sense of the overall destruction. For me, there was just too much needless human story, and not enough giant robots clearly beating the crap out of one another.
In conclusion…
Many people are claiming that those who didn’t like the Transfomers movie went into the theater intending not to like it. Not only is this a huge assumption to make on their part, it’s also a ridiculous one. The fact is, I plan to like ANY movie I go to see, regardless of my preconceived notions. If I actually slap down the 11 bucks for a film showing in a theater, you’d better damn well believe that I think it’s going to be good (or even great) on some level.
On the other hand, people have also been defending this film on the grounds that “YO ITS JUST GIANT ALIEN ROBOTS KICKING @$$ WHATD U EXPECT ROFL.” The common explanation seems to be that because this film was based on a cartoon that was based on a toy, both with a far-fetched backstory, that it didn’t deserve to be done well, and that it’s in fact wrong to have expected a great movie. This logic is inherently flawed, and I’ll tell you why:
- Dorky teenager gets bitten by genetically-enhanced spider and gains super powers, fights crime and psychotic flying super-powered billionaire.
- Garden-variety reptiles undergo mutation and are trained by a rat to fight a blade-wearing Japanese warrior who uses children to commit crimes in New York.
- Noir-esque detective helps a rabbit accused of murder to prove his innocence and defeat a sadistic mastermind who is trying to kill all cartoon characters so that he can build a freeway.
Movie plot lines always sound stupid when you boil them down. These were all based on comics or cartoons, and guess what? They were all successful and well made. And that’s because the people behind Spider-man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn’t just limit themselves to the source material. The stories and ideas were refined for the cinema audience, rather than watered down. Things that might have been overly childish or corny were built upon so that they fit into the film, or they were taken out. In short, the stories were given humanity and spirit, to balance out the more ridiculous aspects of the concept and help the audience suspend their disbelief.
Ironically, the approach with Transformers seems to have been to make the entire thing mechanical. Main characters are shallow and one-sided, supporting characters enter and exit the film when it’s convenient, and certain plot points seem to advance the narrative because they have to, not because the story calls for it. This almost felt like a rough draft of a Transformers movie, as if the whole thing had been kind of fleshed out, but then they just went “eh, good enough” and added in explosions and shaky hand-held camera to fill in the rest of it.
As with any Michael Bay film, Transformers seems to have been manufactured entirely as a piece of eye candy. And that’s fine. It just means that — to use a cliché made even more tired by this film — the new Transformers movie has nothing more to offer than what meets the eye.
Boredom is the right of all sentient beings: a rambling, slightly biased Transformers film review (SPOILERS)
Now that I’ve seen the new Transformers movie, I feel like I just want to write a letter to those involved in the making of it to say thank you.
Yes, thank you for making this movie — without it, old school Transformers fans such as myself would not have all this great new G1 tie-in merchandise to buy. But next time, please, try to make a coherent cinematic experience that those of us who loved the old cartoon and comics would actually enjoy.
It is the year 2007…
The Transformers were introduced back in 1984, and so obviously there are some elements that had to be updated in order to bring a Transformers film into present day. And, as with all movies based on television shows or comics, it’s common for fans of the source material to be dissatisfied by default with the film adaptation. Often times, the movie will stray too far from the source, or will make changes to storylines or characters that die-hard fans simply cannot swallow. However, there’s a difference between making a lousy adaptation and making a lousy movie. And in the case of Michael Bay’s Transformers, I’m sorry to say that it’s the latter.
To say that I grew up with the Transformers would be kind of an understatement — Stan Bush’s “The Touch” was permanently ingrained into my DNA at an early age. And I’ll admit, a lot of what I find wrong with this film has to do with things from the old cartoon I wish they had put in. But an equal amount of the problems with “Transformers” come from both the characters and plot lines unique to this film, as well as the sheer stupidity with which some of these additions were made.
Arrested Development
Let’s start with the characters. The old cartoon was really good about setting up all of the characters from the very beginning — who they were, where they came from, and what they stood for. Sometimes this was done in less than subtle terms (ie Starscream’s vocal desire to replace Megatron as leader), but it was a cartoon, so that was okay. It was over an hour into this film before we even got to introducing the main robot characters, and honestly, that’s just ridiculous. A page could have been taken from the original TMNT movie — a successful film based on a cartoon — which made the suspense palatable in revealing the turtles to the audience, but didn’t overdo it to the point where you were like “where ARE they?!?”
Now, obviously, for a new audience to come into a Transformers movie knowing absolutely nothing, it makes sense to ground viewers with the human characters, to allow the audience to vicariously experience the awe of seeing cars and planes and whatnot turning into giant robots. But there must have been around twelve different core human characters, each with their own split-second setups and introductions, and none of whom (apart from Shia LeBeouf’s Sam Witwicky) you were inclined to become invested in. There just wasn’t enough time for proper character development for all of them. I swear some of them didn’t even have names (hacker girl, Spanish-speaking army guy, etc). And characters would appear and dissappear randomly from the story so much that I didn’t even really notice — I just didn’t care about them.
And the same could be said for the robot cast. The thing about Transformers is that it’s always been a character driven story. You may have watched just to see giant robots beating the crap out of each other, but each Transformer had a distinct personality. It was a cartoon, yes, but we actually cared when these characters went into battle — or when they died. Rather than making the audience become invested in the robot characters, the idea in the film seems to have been to go the “oooooh look giant robots lol” route.
Which meant that when Megatron rips Jazz (incidentally, voiced by Darius McCrary) into two pieces towards the end of the film, my reaction was less “OH HOLY CRAP JAZZ JUST DIED!” and more “oh. That one robot is now dead.” All of the secondary robots looked the same, had similar voices, and spent so little time standing still in robot mode that I honestly have no idea what 90% of them looked like. And Megatron — supposed to be this legendary badass — gets taken out in a flash by Sam and that cube thing. The all-powerful leader of the Decepticons has maybe 15 minutes of screen time and about six lines (remind me again why Frank Welker couldn’t POSSIBLY have provided his voice?)
Needless to say, the best character by far in this film is Optimus Prime. And even he was flawed — some of the things he did and said were just idiotic (hiding under a bridge rather than transforming, “My bad,” etc). Throughout the half of the film they were actually in, the Autobots were — how can I put this nicely? — retarded.
Dare To Be Stupid
It seemed like everyone in this film was an idiot. I say this without an ounce of irony or sarcasm in my voice. The Decepticons honestly didn’t have enough screen time to warrant mention here, but I couldn’t believe how many stupid moves the Autobots pulled off. Crashing into power lines, standing precariously close to the Witwicky’s home, and not even bothering to use their alternate modes! For crying out loud, they’re ROBOTS IN DISGUISE! Apparently, even though the Autobots learned enough from the World Wide Web to know how eBay works and to make stupid “hip” comments (Prime’s “my bad” and Jazz’s “little bitches” remark), they neither learned what power lines were nor how to appropriately fit in unnoticed in the humans’ world — which is THE ENTIRE POINT OF TRANSFORMERS.
Of the main humans, probably the only sane one in the entire movie is Sam Witwicky, which works — Shia LeBeouf really carries the majority of this film, and I tended to become disoriented whenever it would cut back to one of the other plotlines.
But let’s go down the list. The Witwickys seemed rather dense, with Kevin Dunn being well cast and having some good lines, but mostly blathering about his garden. He really seemed kind of underused, which is a shame, because I think he’s a good actor. The mother was a flat out moron, and I’m not even going to mention the “were you masturbating?” scene — something that should never, ever have appeared in a Transformers film. And how did neither of them notice giant robots standing outside their house? For that matter, how did no one else in the neighborhood notice? Sigh. And the appropriately named Megan Fox as Mikaela was really attractive, to say the least, but I found myself consistently rolling my eyes every time she opened her mouth.
There were also several characters that I found dumb solely based on the fact that their plotlines were useless. Hacker girl and Anthony Anderson? That whole side story about the virus? Get rid of it all. It added nothing, it was excruciating to watch, and in the end it just took away from the time that we could have been following Sam’s or the Transformer’s stories on-screen.
All the scenes with the whole “Sector 7″ team were equally unnecessary, though it gave the film some interest in that the giant killer robots from space weren’t the only threatening force in the mix. The one character who I actually thought had some potential was Agent Simmons, played by John Tuturro. The guy was an asshole of Walter Peck-ian proportions, and he played it well. But then what happens to him? Does he ever get the proverbial 50 gallons of marshmallow dumped on him? No idea. He just whines like a baby when that stupid cell phone thing starts attacking them in Hoover Dam, and then he disappears from the movie. And speaking of which…
The defense calls George Lucas
Why is it that films with CGI animation have become a breeding ground for Jar Jar humor? You know what I’m talking about — that asinine, overly childish cartoony humor that first popped up in the Star Wars Special Editions (Jawas falling off of big dinosaur things, robots dropping stuff, Sy Snootles saying “uh-oh!” when the Rancor is released, etc.) and was congealed into a single, despicable entity in the Phantom Menace in the form of Jar Jar Binks.
In any case, this movie has it’s own version, an irritating boom box that turns into a robot aboard Air Force One. The worst part is that, even after it’s decapitated early in the movie, it’s head survives to torment the characters (and the audience) almost until the end of the film. Why? Who cares. Stop, filmmakers. Stop putting these stupid characters into your films. No one finds them funny. Write some actual jokes next time.
Geez. Was there anything you DID like?
I will say this: Prime’s first transformation in the film was pretty badass. It was awesome to see a photorealistic truck transform into this huge robot. When the Autobots initially show up and transform for the first time — THAT was the best part of the movie for me. It was just so cool to see. I wish they had transformed more throughout the rest of movie! Or shown up, for that matter.
And unlike the old cartoon, the general human populace reacts to major destruction of their world at the hands of alien robots. So that lent an air of credibility to this film that the old series lacked.
There were also a few nice little touches that harkened back to the old series as well. There’s a VW beetle visible when Sam is buying Bumblebee, and there’s a scene where Sam is running from the Decepticon police car yelling “oh, shit.” Megatron yells at Starscream (who shows up randomly at some point), telling him that he’s failed him again. And Prime finally utters the quote from the packaging of his toy (”Freedom is the right of all sentient beings”), which was cool. But for the most part, these were too little too late.
I was hoping that if the film sucked, there would at least be some cool battles between giant transforming robots. The problem with a lot of the Tranformer battle scenes, though, was they were done in that soon-to-be-hackneyed handheld shaky-camera style. The design of the robots in this film, as I’ve said before, are kind of like a bunch of tiny bits of metal glued together, unlike the boxy robots of the old series. So for the most part, you’re basically seeing blurry chunks of metal rolling around at high speed. Not exactly epic. A few more wide shots would have been nice, to show more detail of the fights and to get a better sense of the overall destruction. For me, there was just too much needless human story, and not enough giant robots clearly beating the crap out of one another.
In conclusion…
Many people are claiming that those who didn’t like the Transfomers movie went into the theater intending not to like it. Not only is this a huge assumption to make on their part, it’s also a ridiculous one. The fact is, I plan to like ANY movie I go to see, regardless of my preconceived notions. If I actually slap down the 11 bucks for a film showing in a theater, you’d better damn well believe that I think it’s going to be good (or even great) on some level.
On the other hand, people have also been defending this film on the grounds that “YO ITS JUST GIANT ALIEN ROBOTS KICKING @$$ WHATD U EXPECT ROFL.” The common explanation seems to be that because this film was based on a cartoon that was based on a toy, both with a far-fetched backstory, that it didn’t deserve to be done well, and that it’s in fact wrong to have expected a great movie. This logic is inherently flawed, and I’ll tell you why:
- Dorky teenager gets bitten by genetically-enhanced spider and gains super powers, fights crime and psychotic flying super-powered billionaire.
- Garden-variety reptiles undergo mutation and are trained by a rat to fight a blade-wearing Japanese warrior who uses children to commit crimes in New York.
- Noir-esque detective helps a rabbit accused of murder to prove his innocence and defeat a sadistic mastermind who is trying to kill all cartoon characters so that he can build a freeway.
Movie plot lines always sound stupid when you boil them down. These were all based on comics or cartoons, and guess what? They were all successful and well made. And that’s because the people behind Spider-man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit didn’t just limit themselves to the source material. The stories and ideas were refined for the cinema audience, rather than watered down. Things that might have been overly childish or corny were built upon so that they fit into the film, or they were taken out. In short, the stories were given humanity and spirit, to balance out the more ridiculous aspects of the concept and help the audience suspend their disbelief.
Ironically, the approach with Transformers seems to have been to make the entire thing mechanical. Main characters are shallow and one-sided, supporting characters enter and exit the film when it’s convenient, and certain plot points seem to advance the narrative because they have to, not because the story calls for it. This almost felt like a rough draft of a Transformers movie, as if the whole thing had been kind of fleshed out, but then they just went “eh, good enough” and added in explosions and shaky hand-held camera to fill in the rest of it.
As with any Michael Bay film, Transformers seems to have been manufactured entirely as a piece of eye candy. And that’s fine. It just means that — to use a cliché made even more tired by this film — the new Transformers movie has nothing more to offer than what meets the eye.
But yeah, all it was from what it seems is Eye Candy and Advertising. =/
For me the biggest problems were that the ethos around the Autobots was never set, your first few encounters with Bumble bee give them a distinctly good but dark feel about them which would be acceptable but as soon as the rest of them turn up it turns in a retards 'r' us convention. The next one was Cypher that irritating little mini-con like Decptacon from air force one, i hated him, he was about as covert operative like as a freight train. I would of expected Cypher to be more like A.M.E.E from Red Planet when she's in military mode. The next most haenus movie cliché crime that got committed was Jazz. what does he contribute to the Autobots that no one else does? Nothing, so he dies (i spotted that one when during the first meeting with the Autobots). The next movie cliché crime that was committed was this, the black guy dies first and would you believe it or not the only Autobot to die is not only Mr. Expendable but one that voiced by a black guy. need i say more. The last thing I'm going to say is about is the whole sector 7 team, they must have been to the retards 'r' us convention with the Autobots because they were about as convincing as a hyper-secret government group as the Autobots were at being oh so intelligent.