Archive for July, 2007

I never played with the Transformers toys, I was more of a Turtles-guy myself, and I’ve never seen the cartoon so I felt kind of indifferent when the movie was announced. My anticipation grew when the trailers started to emerge, the CGI looked incredible and even if the story, acting etc. sucked, I would hopefully still get some nice action. I saw the movie yesterday, and I got what I expected.

It’s a mediocre picture at best, I liked the opening with the story about the war and the cube though, and the fact that it was Sam’s (Shia LaBeouf) great-great grand-father who had seen Megatron, encased in ice, was neat, although I initially had a bad feeling that Sam would be a part of the story by sheer coincidence, fortunately he is the protagonist because his relative found Megatron. I also liked the beginning of the movie with Sam going after Mikaela (played by Megan Fox, who is one of the hottest actresses I have seen in a very, very long time, by the way), even though it was filled with clichés. LaBeouf actually does a great job, he’s not the best actor in the world, but his frantic behavior fits nicely into the movie, and he’s pretty funny.

Then the action started and it was cool! The first scenes with Barricade and Bumblebee was incredible, I especially enjoyed myself when Barricade roared “Are you LadiesMan217?” because he sounded pretty cool, and well, it was funny. As expected the CGI is impressive, and most of the action sequences are fascinating and exciting. In some scenes, especially with transformers in melee combat, it became confusing. It was hard to distinguish the robots from one and other.

Now, to some of the bad parts. First of all the movie had some ridiculous and unnecessary subplots, especially the one with the analyst Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor) and hacker Glen Whitmann (Anthony Anderson: God, I hate that guy). Maggie is a top-notch analyst trying to decrypt an audio-message from the Decepticons, even though she’s in a building with some of the best sound analysts in the world, she is certain that “only one man can break the code”, and this world-saving guy is Glen Whitmann, a fat geek living at home played by the very annoying Anthony Anderson. Typical cliché of a computer hacker, it’s probably one of my top five worst movie clichés in the world. He doesn’t even have advanced equipment, he just loads the message into his desktop pc and boom, a few seconds later he has broken it. One may think that Transformers are able to decrypt their messages a little better, but apparently not. Now Maggie and Glen are the only persons with the key to saving the earth. Meh.

Another stupid sub story is that of Megatron being held capture in the Hoover Dam since 1934. And apparently all major technological breakthroughs, such as the automobile, came from the technology found within Megatron. It’s just an unnecessary plotline that isn’t very believable. How did they keep him frozen down when transporting him from the North Pole? How did they know they had to keep him frozen? There are also a lot of small weird scenes that don’t really make sense, like Whitmann connecting old computers to send a morse code, the Autobots choosing to go to a crowded city with the cube, even though they want to protect humans, etc.

Transformers: 6/10.