By now I am sure you have all seen transformers, they have made over 300 million so far. The thing I don’t get is that most of the reviews out there range from good to great when the movie was terrible. It was on the same level of crap as Perl Harbour, in fact it was Perl Harbour with robots instead of fighter plans. Now to be fair I dislike all Michael Bay movies except for Bad Boys 2 (if you stick you fingers in your ears whenever Martin Lawrence in talking).
The one thing Bay is good at is making big special effect sequences like the car case in The Island, the car case in Bad Boys 2, and the car case in The Rock. So you think a movie where cars turn in to robots would be right up his alley, but you would not know it from watching the fight scenes in Transformers. Not to say they look bad, Industrial Light and Magic has done a wonderful job like they always do. The problem is the robots are too complicated and the camera is way to close to the action that when they do fight it looks like a giant ball of trash rolling around. With the over complex design the robots lack features that would allow you to tell them apart, the only 2 robots you can tell apart from the rest is Bumblebee because he is yellow and Optimums prime because he is blue with red flames. As for the camera it is so close to the action that you have no clue what is happening, plus it is all steady cam style meaning it is shaking like crazy which makes matters worse. What it comes down to is that you have no clear idea of what is going on which makes the action very boring and painful to watch. And think on you TV it will be that much worse. Now this does not mean that all the action bad, I did enjoy the car case on the freeway.
Of course Transformers is not all about battling robots there is a lot of human stuff in there as well. There are 3 major subplots, the first deals with the group of marines lead by Josh Duhamel which has some cool looking military stuff but in the end adds nothing to the movie and should have been cut. The second is with the secretary of defence and the group of analysts which is so badly acted and again adds nothing to the movie and should have been cut. The third is with Shia LaBeouf which is the story of a boy and his car that can turn in to a giant robot. Now if only the movie focused on the third subplot and dropped the rest because this movie should be about a boy and his robot the problem is that it never becomes that. Because the movie keeps jumping to those other badly acted and completely pointless parts we never get to see the relationship between the boy and his robot become anything, and when we do spend time with the boy most of the time is spent ogling the very hot Megan Fox (not that I have any problem with that). If the Michael Bay dropped the other 2 sub plots and gave the relationship time to develop then it would have pulled the audience in and got us to care about what we were seeing. Instead we get stupid Herby style car jokes and Jon Voight turning in the worst acting job of his career.
If after all that you still liked the movie you should slap yourself in the face and go buy the Iron Giant. Now there is a movie about a boy and his robot where you actually care when the robot is hurt because the relationship is so well developed that it completely pulls you in to the story. If only Brad Bird or James Cameron had directed Transformers, well I can dream cant I.
Liberty don’t give it up without a fight!