The Transformers movie poll!

[Rollo Tomassi]

Paramount will forgive you if you go buy some TF bedsheets, TF birthday plates,cups, and napkins, an Optimus Prime voice changer helmet, the TF videogame, and a t-shirt with the Autobot symbol on it.

[anarky]

Wow.

That's all I can say. I finished watching it a little while ago.

Wow.

Wow.

How the fuck did this thing get made?

I expected mediocre, maybe even pretty bad. I didn't think this would be a movie in the same league as Mac & Me or Highlander 2.

I'll post a more in-depth review, more likely elsewhere than here. As fun as the bad language here is, I'd like to see the defenders (most notably a semi-deranged fellow who claims to have seen it a few dozen times) can respond.

Shit, mabs, you watched this twice? You are a far braver man than I. I'd rather be ass-abused by Michael Clarke Duncan than watch this shit again.

[anarky]

Here goes, and I really restrained the disgust quite a bit:

So, I've finally put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I borrowed a copy of this yesterday and was able to watch it today.

Wow!

I am thoroughly amazed!

I was totally wrong about this movie!!

I agree with one thing every fan has said: When I first saw Prime transform, I felt like I was ten years old again....

...ten years old and grounded, forced to sit quietly in a room while someone else watched Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

See, I thought it looked unimpressive from what I'd seen. I was expecting something that would be okay, but not spectacular. Possibly even mediocre, or a slight chance it might even be bad.

I was not expecting an embarassment to the human race. I feel that I have to personally track down Michael Bay, kick him in the nads, and demand back the fifty IQ points I lost while watching this turd.

It was as embarassing to its namesake as Batman and Robin. It was as full of heavy-handed, pointless product placements as Mac & Me. There was as little characterization as there was in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. The action was as tough to follow as Highlander 2. The story made as little sense as Superman IV.

Anyone who knows me will recognize those as the movies that, until earlier today, I thought to be the five worst movies ever made. Transformers fits somewhere in there. I can't definitively say it is the worst, as I've seen it only once, and would rather spend the rest of my life in prison (with an enormous guy named Tiny Bubbles as my bunkmate) than considering watchinig it again. But it's definitely down there. As loathe as I am to say it, I think Batman & Robin and Mac & Me are both better than this steaming piece of crap.

Michael Bay has successfully made his Pearl Harbor look like Citizen Kane in comparison.

Before you jump to what seems to be the normal course of action for defenders, I do not care that the characters look different. I do not care that the backstory isn't the same as the 80s cartoon.

But I do care that, aside from usually imperceptible size differences and color schemes on a few characters, they are all totally indistinguishable from one another, both in terms of visuals and characterization. And I certainly care that a 22-minute cartoon from twenty years ago, aimed at 8-year olds and with the sole purpose of selling toys, had a stronger storyline than a movie that was almost 2&1/2 hours long.

At every point in the movie, something had me groaning, rolling my eyes, or commenting on the stupidity of it all. We have an organization that's so secret that the Secretary of Defense has never heard of it, yet they can tell the guys at NASA to keep something under wraps, and apparently NASA didn't say, "Who the hell are you?"

We have "robots in disguise" running around in circles for no reason.

We have Optimus Prime warning one of his Genericbots (Ironhide?) not to harm humans, then two minutes later nearly killing a carful of people by causing a high-speed crash.

We have the US military acting like idiots at every juncture, culminating in their decision to take an intergalactic battle into a major population center rather than at the relatively isolated Hoover Dam. (And what the hell city is that? They leave Hoover Dam a few minutes before the Decepticons, then are seen battling them in what's clearly Vegas, and suddenly are fighting them again in what looks like LA or San Francisco. Huh?) And a Secretary of Defense who's so incompetent that, when the Decepticons (I'm guessing, since this was never addressed) planted info that Iran, China, and North Korea were all moving against us, he didn't just pick up the phone and contact someone in any of those countries to verify jacksquat.

We have Megatron chastizing Starscream, although it's only the second time we've seen him in the movie, and in the entire four seconds we've seen him, there's no indication he failed at anything--unlike Megatron, who got his a** frozen, but was somehow able to randomly burn a map into some dude's glasses.

We have Hugo Weaving voicing Megatron because Frank Welker sounded "too old." This despite Optimus Prime sounding like he's on his last legs in a nursing home throughout the entire movie.

We have Autobots acting every bit as stupid as the military, peeing on people and saying inane comments like, "My bad."

We have Frenzy, who is apparently the love child of a Gremlin and Salacious Crumb, who was subsequently raised by the Jackalope from America's Funniest People. No one ever thinks it odd that a frigging boombox keeps showing up at random places in the frigging Pentagon of all places? Christ, that was stupid when Soundwave did it in '84.

And you know what we don't have? A single minority character who wasn't a blatantly racist stereotype. I'm usually the last person to complain about this, but it was outright offensive. Is Bay secretly a Grand Wizard in the Klan?

Every character was merely a name. None of the Genericbots and Forgettablecons were fleshed out at all, aside from Optimus Prime, who was so incompetent that he bore no resemblance to any previous version of the character. Even Megatron was nothing more than this weird Sauron lookalike bouncing around.

When an action scene as big as the finale had me bored to tears because I couldn't follow what the hell was going on, there's a problem. I'm sorry. You can't use the "awesome special effects" defense here. This is 2007. We've all seen movies like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, even this obscure little gem called Star Wars. Special effects alone cannot save a movie. This is all stuff we've seen before, and handled better.

Hell, they killed Jazz, and I didn't care, because he wasn't a character! Put a few frigging dollars into making a decent g**d*** script, make us give a s*** about any of what we're seeing! Simply hoping we'll identify with them because we remember far better characters from two decades ago that shared their names does not characterization make.

Even the score was bad. Sometimes it was knockoff Jurassic Park, sometimes knockoff LOTR. And once or twice it sounded like an asinine ripoff of some 4th-rate animated POS.

You want to make a Transformers movie that's from the human perspective, Mr Bay? Fine. Then here's a tip: at least make the storylines about the humans better than the stories from Folgers Coffee commercials!

Yeah, this wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. It was worse. Yeah, that's a cliche. But I feel comfortable saying it, since everything about this movie was a cliche, from the 1980s high school melodrama to the predictable story arc about the soldier (who I don't recall even being named!) and his daughter.

This movie pretty much failed on all levels, for the reasons I sorta expected. I just didn't expect it to fail so miserably. Maybe Bay does deserve an award for making something so incredibly craptacular.

I'm glad Grimlock wasn't in this. I hope and pray that, to preserve the dignity of a character who speaks like a half-witted caveman and shouts about kicking butt, he doesn't appear in any sequels to this.

[Ran]

So, ummm. I guess you didn't really like it?

[mabudon]

that "folgers" line is sheer brilliance, man, killer review overall

And yes, I sat in front of it twice, but the second time we were drinkin and ripping on how fuckin awful it was, in my living room so it was not something I paid full attention to- seeing the looks on my buddies faces was worth the pain

[mabudon]

someone should recut it like this
http://www.the-editing-room.com/transformers.html

[anarky]

Comic writer Simon Furman confirmed in an interview that the title of the sequel does refer to the character The Fallen, and not just some oblique reference to Megatron.

Because nothing reminds grownups of their childhood in the 1980s like an obscure character created for a Dreamwave comic around 2003.

[vynsane]

did you hear that shia labooof's hand is "crushed" in that accident he had? i guess he was acting like he could drive.

[anarky]

I don't wish ill on anyone (even Liefeld or Bay), but I kinda hope this ruins his career.

[unlimitedpudding]

Remember the part where King Arthur got to the castle that was occupied by the French in Monty Python's Holy Grail? I'm pretty sure that the one french guy says "Shia LaBeouf" right before they launch the cow at King Arthur.

[Rollo Tomassi]

Remember the part where King Arthur got to the castle that was occupied by the French in Monty Python's Holy Grail? I'm pretty sure that the one french guy says "Shia LaBeouf" right before they launch the cow at King Arthur.

Pitché de vache.

"Toss the cow."

But nice try, unlimited pudding.

[mabudon]

actually it was "Fetchée la vache", which isn't French but means "get the cow" in the context of the film

OWNED

[Ran]

Transformers was on HBO tonight. I missed...well, "missed" is the wrong word...didn't see the first 20 minutes or so. Fuck. Even though I read all your posts, I still seriously underestimated the suckage.

[anarky]

If you missed the first twenty, you missed the late Bernie Mac in a role that was, somehow, simultaneously a waste of his talent and completely inappropriate for the movie.