Monday, July 16, 2007
Movie Review: Transformers
With Malaya returned from her extended foreign business trip/family vacation, we had some time for a belated b-day (mine) celebration day, and we chose to spend it largely in the cinema. We caught Transformers in the afternoon, then had a big Chinese food dinner, and to get the taste (of the awful Transformers, not the excellent meal) out of our mouths, we went back and saw Harry Potter 5 in the evening. I've not reviewed any movies in months, but I might as well get back on the horse and do these two. I'm curious to see how Transformers will fare in my categorized rating system anyway, since it was incredibly uneven.
Well, that assumes I even remember my movie rating categories. It's been a while. Thank god for cut and paste, eh?
Transformers
Script/Story: 0
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 8
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 4
Overall: 3
This score is very up and down, and obviously comes nowhere near averaging out. It's actually better than I thought it would be in one way, since while driving home with Malaya and taking turns laughing at the most unbelievably stupid thing we could each think of in Transformers, I commented on some portions of the score being sub zero. I believe, "negative five" was mentioned, and when Malaya pointed out that such a score would in fact be illegal, I answered with one word. "
Rush."
I didn't dip anything for Transformers that low, but as I once threatened in my review of
Charlie's Angels, if my categories had an, "accurately reflects physical reality" score, it would now be broken. I have never, and I mean this seriously, as a veteran of many, many very stupid action movies, seen a movie that made less sense and had more unbelievable (in a bad way) things happen in it than did in Transformers. I won't say that every single scene in the film was logically impossible or at least stupidly improbable, but far more were than were not, and most of them were in multiple ways. There were at least 15 or 20 times during the film that Malaya or me leaned over to the other and made some sarcastic remark about how dumb or ridiculous or absurd was something we'd just seen on the screen.
The only saving grace, if there is one, is that the horrible, horrible script and events within it were intentional. It wasn't just an endless series of accidents and stupidities and errors; the script was intentionally written to exclude more than the most casual regard for "that could/would ever happen in a million years" and that turned the countless mistakes and errors and stupidities into stylistic devices, rather than mistakes. In theory, anyway.
I will explain, and I might as well go in order to do it.
Script/Story: 0Okay, so this is the one that really dragged everything down, and the one that most closely meshes with my main complaints about the film. And even though I'm giving this a zero, take this with some salt grains, since I am grading it as a semi-demanding adult viewer, even though I realize the movie was basically written on about a 3rd grade level. It's a film-length episode of the old, crappy, Transformers TV show. Of course all of the actions are stupid and the conveniences legion and the bad guys dumb and scheming and the good guys noble and stupid and the humans scrambling and annoying, etc. If you look at it from the correct perspective, this score could probably be an 8. And it would be, if I too were 8 (years old) or I were grading this $200m movie on how well it recreated the insipid, seemingly Google-bot translated from Japanese, every episode was the same, all dialogue and events are irrelevant except as a lead in to the final fight scene, children's cartoon.
That being said, as an adult who was at best a very mild fan of the Transformers as a kid, this movie had the dumbest "plot" and most ridiculous characters and events I've ever seen in a major Hollywood production. Listing or ranking all the stupidities would take longer and force far more contemplation on this mental bubble gum than I'm willing to sacrifice, but I will list a few things I learned.
Annoying teenaged boys with stupid fathers will willing car shop at the spur of the moment and pay $4000 for beat up yellow Camaro's without pink slips from shifty used car salesmen when said car might have an actual resale value of as much as $500. (The oldest Camaro the Kelly Blue Book site lets you select is 1987, and in far better condition than the movie one it's estimated at $1700.)
Once you establish contact with the Pentagon; whether by phone, ancient computer morse code, or short wave radio, you can order an air strike from US fighter jets which will arrive anywhere on earth within three minutes.
Whether an action sequence begins at dusk or noon, and whether it lasts 5 minutes or an hour, it will always be dark by the time the special effects begin. The first 5 set pieces in this movie did this, with absolutely no regard for the actual speed of the earth's rotation.
An Autobot can send a message to other Transformers flying in deep space by shining a light from its chest on the clouds over town. The message will be received and the other Autobots will fly to earth and crash land within a day, in violation of every Einsteinian law of space and time.
The US Military cracks (not very) encrypted computer virus codes by inviting in dozens of random computer experts and putting them all in one giant room with lots of desks covered in huge flat screen monitors and then leaving them completely unsupervised.
When the Autobots arrive they will land all over the earth, yet be able to shape shift into cars and drive to meet up in an alley in downtown LA in less than an hour. Once they arrive they will know all about earth customs, speak slang English, know how to break dance, and have formed detailed, morally-nuanced opinions of humans despite having never heard of us until approximately thirty seconds earlier.
Robots that can take on the shape and function of any machine on earth will all choose to become crappy plastic 2008 model Chevrolets, despite the fact that their enemies are tanks, fighter jets, giant guns, and other actually useful things.
The same seven US Marines will wind up in five or six separate fire fights with the Decepticons on three different continents, and despite routinely taking cover behind plywood and glass walls as enough fire comes in to hurl tanks hundreds of meters, will take no more causalities than one guy getting shot in the leg.
Honestly, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Literally every major scene in the film has at least a handful of complete physical impossibilities obvious enough to strain the brain of any thinking adult human. As I said, it's a kid's cartoon blown up to 4x the length, 100000x the budget, and in live action. The plot is on the level of any episode of any Japanimation series from 1982, nothing makes any sense, there are no realistic physics, none of the humans ever behave at all like a real person would, none of the robots or humans have believable motivations, there's no reason for 90% of what happens, etc, etc. I spent the first hour of the movie sighing and rubbing my face in pain, in much the same way I do while trying to skim through one of the horribly-written, formulaic, PoS fantasy novels that result from most computer game adaptations.
One interesting approach to the film was in Harry Knowles' review. Yeah, the AICN guy. I hadn't looked at that site in at least a year, but I saw a link to his review and thought, "Oh yeah, I should see what an uber geek who might actually have liked Transformers when he was 8 thought about the film." As it turns out Harry didn't really like it, though he said he'd see it several more times to be sure. Huh? His insight though, was that it was supposed to be a movie about a boy who falls in love with his new piece of junk car, uses it to get the hot girl, and then discovers that the car is actually a living alien robotic creature, and that it's there to protect him and help save the earth from evil robots. Harry pointed out that all the stuff about the Pentagon, the soldiers in Qatar, the world wide presence of the Decepticons, etc, was all distraction from the core plot of the movie, and should have been less obvious and only come in once the core premise was established.
It's an interesting theory, and probably a better idea, but there's one key problem with it. Every single scene with the boy and his car and the girl was absolute cinematic shit. Horribly written, acted, and directed. It was those scenes that had me sighing and rubbing my face for the first hour of the film. More of them would have improved the movie on a theoretically level, but only in the way that adding more shit and stink to an outhouse improves its essential function.
You get Michael Bay to make your movie, you'd do well to write out all the human interaction, since he's just going to turn it all into schmaltzy bullshit anyway. The guy made Pearl Harbor, FSS. A movie so bad that one of the funnier songs in Team America could casually refer to something sucking almost as hard as that film, and have everyone in the audience get the joke, whether they've actually seen Pearl Harbor or not. I never saw it, but I have seen The Rock, and I think they could have saved a few million on Transformers by just reusing all the military jet/airport/troop footage from that film in this one. It would have been cheaper than shooting all new scenes that were almost shot for shot remakes of the ones from The Rock.
Acting/Casting: 4
Is there any point in going on, at this point? I might as well. I'll be brief, though. This score is internally conflicted, since I didn't care about any character or robot in the movie, but I'm not sure how much of that was the acting, and how much was the dreadful script. So I'm giving the actors the benefit of the doubt. The stammering, nerdy guy hero wasn't endearing or interesting, but the girl was pretty hot, at least the portion of her above her hips and below her clavicle, and while every other character in the movie was some flavor of ridiculous stereotype, they were relatively effective stereotypes.
Action: 8
Obviously this was the selling point, and while I thought they needed far more of it, and while most of it was pretty stupid in deed, it looked pretty, and some of the fights were cool. If illogical.
Eye Candy: 9
I'm overscoring this one, but the robots were very, very cool in robot form and during their transformations, and that's really what the movie was about.
Fun Factor: 5
I didn't exactly enjoy any of the action scenes, but they were kind of fun to watch, in so far as I could turn off my brain.
Replayability: 4
I would require a considerable bribe to sit through this whole film again, but I'd watch the best 30 minutes of fight scenes and such for free.
Overall: 3
I freely admit that I'm scoring this one as though it was intended to be a real movie that would be enjoyable by an adult who didn't spend the last year playing with their Transformer toys in anticipation. It was not. It was a kid's movie, and I'm sure a kid would enjoy a lot of it. I wouldn't have at that age, since I remember thinking how stupid the Transformers and G.I. Joe cartoons were (they had essentially the same plots every episode). Every time the bad guys would scheme and attack and nearly kill the good guys and destroy some huge chunk of the earth, and the good guys would fight back and just barely win, and then as the bad guys limped away the noble good guy leader would say, "Let them go. We've got work to do rebuilding."
And then next episode the bad guys would attack again.
Even at age 8 or 9 that drove me crazy, and I used to shout at the good guys, through the TV, "Why don't you kill them when you have the chance? They're going to come back and kill thousands more innocent people next week!"
Thankfully, that plot element was not (directly) recycled in Transformers the movie, but everything else was equally dumb, and the overarching sensation I had while walking away from the theater was disappointment and regret that they'd aimed low, and achieved lower. It reminded me, in a way, of Ice Age, another relatively popular film that I did not think acceptable for an adult audience. Nothing in Ice Age was that horrible, but it was just so relentlessly mediocre and bland and unimaginative. Transformers was the same, in plot and logic and physics. Looked pretty, but existed on about a 4th grade level, and I was unsuccessful at unplugging my brain completely enough to tolerate it. That being said, Ice Age was relatively popular and I've heard numerous adults say they actually enjoyed it. Transformers is getting more positive than negative reviews, and those are presumably by adults. So maybe it's just me.
I'll add the Harry Potter 5 review later on Monday.Labels: movie review
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