TRANSFORMERS
starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Optimus Prime...
director: Michael Bay
writer: Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
date: July 10th 2007
reviewer: suj
rating: 6.2
The credit "A Michael Bay Film" isn't often seen as a favorable asset to any movie to which it is attached to because of its stigma of positioning the story second to the visuals, but I must admit that from time to time I kind of dig the man's work. He's your premiere go to guy for quick cuts, mild laughs, big huge enormous explosive action, and basically the guy just makes films that are nearly impossible to take your eyes off of. So, naturally when I heard that he was going to be directing the big screen adaptation of the beloved Transformers franchise I for one was soaked because what can be better than the combination of the king of explosions and big fucking giant robots?
Before I get into my whole spew allow me to preface first by saying that I had no problems with the transformers character re-designs and also that the effects in this movie and the big fucking giant robot action therein is fucking unbelievable, the effects house on this movie should win an Oscar, better yet, they should all receive sexual favors from one Miss Megan Fox - it's that damn good.
So, now on to my critique of Michael Bay's take on the whole transforming robot affair. I would say for the action set pieces with big fucking robot action, Michael Bay succeeded on all accounts, but for everything thing else it was a fucking abysmal mess. One can compare the story, character development (or lack thereof) and it's attempts at comedy to watching the complete first season of According to Jim while a big fucking giant robot with the face of NBA superstar Sam Cassell constantly kicks you in your reproductive organs. Is it that hard nowadays to have a fucking story, a fucking heart in our proposed blockbuster movies? It appears that todays general viewing audiences are just in it for the explosions and horrible jokes and that's just sad. It really is. And people wonder why were flooded with so much shitty movies.
Hollywood, can you stop raping my childhood. Please. You ruined Fantastic Four, Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, among others. Must you ruin Transformers too?
It's a given that there wasn't really any deep thinking engaging heart wrenching plot to the original television series, as you had for any given episode, the Decepticons finding a new way to make energon cubes thus forcing the Autobots to stop them and or vice versa. Each episode would eventually end with a confrontation between the warring conglomerates of giant robots as they seemingly float in midair with blasters firing - soon the involved Decepticons would retreat while the Autobots welcome a new member who helped turned the tide of the battle during its last minute. With the simplicities of the series, what made it awesome was't its paper thin plot, but its characters and the relationships therein - you had the loving camaraderie among the Autobots or rivalries within the Decepticons, you had Starscream's constant desire to dethrone Megatron, you had Optimus Prime as an ethical role model. These were the key elements that made the show work and that made it more than just a picture show of transforming machines. They were characters with morals, conflicts, and desires. But alas the film makers decided to bastardize these key elements and head into the direction where the movie adapted its source material in name only.
I understand that they couldn't make a direct adaptation of the original series, it just wouldn't work and frankly it would kind of suck if they did do that. So, if you're not going to focus your movie on Optimus Prime, Megatron and their respective band of big fucking giant robots and instead lead your focus towards a human element, one would expect to have a good human drama with big fucking robot action spliced within? I actually like the idea of focusing on humans within the Transformers mythos; there were humans in the original series, but none that held central focus.
Instead of giving us an engaging human point of view that invloved the world of Transformers, the film makers decide to bring in all this meaningless boring government shit. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't want to see how the pentagon would react and deal with the looming treat of transforming alien robots. As good as the military action sequences were, everything that involved the government and the characters therein was just fucking stupid. We're introduced to entire groups of characters who do absolutely nothing in the film. For example, the inclusion of Anthony Anderson who's brought in as the only hacker in the world who can figure out the meaning of a mysterious signal the Decepticons sent out during an attack. But to get there we have to sit through a painful introduction to his character that is meant to be funny but lacks heavily in that department and ends up being time consuming. While we're on the subject of hackers, an entire group of them is brought in at one point and they just kind of sit there, with the exception of this hot Australian chick (Possible plot for sequel: Australian chick and Megan Fox in a big fucking giant robot orgy?). All of this business is just boring, a complete waste of time, and adds nothing to the proceedings.
They should have just held off on all the government/military nonsense for later on in the movie and have kept its focus on the heart of the film, that being, Shia LaBeouf's storyline - a story about a boy and his car that happens to be a big fucking giant alien robot. They should have started the film with Shia's Sam Witwicky character running towards his Dad with A- paper plainly in sight and eventually getting his car (without all the Herbie gags or windows shattering or Bernie Mac shenanigans). We watch him fall in love with his shitty beat up yellow camaro and going after the girl - the driving her home sequence is fantastic. We watch as Sam and his car spend time together, bond. Though, the film makers decide to go the way of "the freak-out / my car is evil" line of storytelling - it just would have been much better if we could have witnessed Sam enjoying the notion of having his very own Transformer, that everything is just fucking cool, then when everything appears to be copasetic you can introduce some Decepticon bullying action, which would lead to the conflict, the dilemma of warring factions of robots that have made earth its battlefield.
That scene where Bumblebee is being tortured by Sector Seven didn't mean anything because nothing had been develop between the characters yet, there was no relationship built between the two to warrant the audience to evoke a reaction. This was no ET being taken away from Elliot moment, though it was trying to be. It's as if finding out that one of the nameless Stromtroopers in Star Wars had cancer and expecting us to care. The violin tinged mood music and Sam's emotional distraught deposition was not necessary or earned because we were so busy trying to establish the jarheads, the Air Force One bullshit, the code breakers, and the hackers instead of creating that bond between boy and alien machine.
They should have used the ET model, the Iron Giant model, when approaching this movie where we have our hero create a strong bond with his alien/robot counterpart so that their lies an emotional significance when the government tries to take his friend away. Sam Witwicky is the heart of the movie; he's Elliot, he's Hogarth, they should have used those characters as blueprints to construct a story where a boy discovers just how vast the universe really is, bonding with an alien from a distant planet who introduces him to the hidden world around us. Then the boy is shown just how terrifying that discovery is when he realizes that it isn't just about compassionate robots but that there also exists an entire breed of other robots that are set out to destroy not just the boy's robot or the Autobots, but all living creatures. The film needed to escalate, not just with battles, but the ideas behind the battles. It's just pace and development, two of the simplistic keys in storytelling.
Perhaps the worst thing about this movie and why I distaste it so much is its constant onslaught of embarrassingly unfunny jokes. It plays like a Family Guy episode with crude jokes with no laughs. Bumblebee doing his best R. Kelly impression? Was that really necessary? There are just too many of these horrid attempts at comedy to even write or acknowledge. This is what people find funny? really? What the fuck?
Also the movie lacks in the "awe" department, not so much us the audience but the characters within the movie. Aren't people supposed to be surprised to see giant fucking robots existing in the real world? There isn't a moment in this movie where you believe people are really reacting to seeing giant fucking robots. In Jurassic Park or in War of the Worlds you believed that these people were really having their minds blown by what was standing right in front of them. In Transformers they say things like "It's a robot. You know, like a super advanced robot. It's probably Japanese" and you're supposed to laugh. It's a fucking giant robot for fucks sakes, be fucking astounded at what your witnessing it's not as if giant fucking robots are a commonality in today's world.
Futhermore, Would it be safe to say that this movie is also kind of racist? You see they appear to make the Autobot character of Jazz into a black stereotype with his opening line of dialogue akin to "Yo yo yo wusssuuup, Autobots. Represent!" all the while having him break-dance as he transforms. The kicker in all this is that the next time you see this character is at the end when Optimus Prime is casually holding his broken-in-half corpse like it was nothing. The only significant Transformer death is that of the perceived black character? Though, none of the transformers (decepticons specifically) were development as characters so it didn't really matter if they've lived to see another movie.
What made Batman Begins, Alien(s), Terminator, and other movies of its kind so good was that it wasn't so much about batman, aliens, and robots but Bruce Wayne, Ripley, and Sarah Conner as characters and how they re-act to their respective unreal situations. How they develop as characters to go up againt unimaginable odds. And that's where the writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (it's not all Bay's fault) missed the mark, these were JJ Abrams writers, they wrote for Alias. I just expected better from those two. Why couldn't they just pace themselves in the effort to flesh out their characters to bring forth an engaing story so that when you bring in all the big fucking robot action it would be rightly satisfiying.
I wanted this movie to be all kinds of orgasmic glory of giant fucking robot action and a wicked story; it appears that it would only deliver on the former, at least that's more than most movies in Hollywood dare to give. At the end of the day Michael Bay's Transformers is essentially like a porn movie, just replace all the fucking with giant robots - it's all action, no story, and it appears for the majority of the movie going audience that's all they need to get by.
director: Michael Bay
writer: Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
date: July 10th 2007
reviewer: suj
rating: 6.2
The credit "A Michael Bay Film" isn't often seen as a favorable asset to any movie to which it is attached to because of its stigma of positioning the story second to the visuals, but I must admit that from time to time I kind of dig the man's work. He's your premiere go to guy for quick cuts, mild laughs, big huge enormous explosive action, and basically the guy just makes films that are nearly impossible to take your eyes off of. So, naturally when I heard that he was going to be directing the big screen adaptation of the beloved Transformers franchise I for one was soaked because what can be better than the combination of the king of explosions and big fucking giant robots?
Before I get into my whole spew allow me to preface first by saying that I had no problems with the transformers character re-designs and also that the effects in this movie and the big fucking giant robot action therein is fucking unbelievable, the effects house on this movie should win an Oscar, better yet, they should all receive sexual favors from one Miss Megan Fox - it's that damn good.
So, now on to my critique of Michael Bay's take on the whole transforming robot affair. I would say for the action set pieces with big fucking robot action, Michael Bay succeeded on all accounts, but for everything thing else it was a fucking abysmal mess. One can compare the story, character development (or lack thereof) and it's attempts at comedy to watching the complete first season of According to Jim while a big fucking giant robot with the face of NBA superstar Sam Cassell constantly kicks you in your reproductive organs. Is it that hard nowadays to have a fucking story, a fucking heart in our proposed blockbuster movies? It appears that todays general viewing audiences are just in it for the explosions and horrible jokes and that's just sad. It really is. And people wonder why were flooded with so much shitty movies.
Hollywood, can you stop raping my childhood. Please. You ruined Fantastic Four, Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, among others. Must you ruin Transformers too?
It's a given that there wasn't really any deep thinking engaging heart wrenching plot to the original television series, as you had for any given episode, the Decepticons finding a new way to make energon cubes thus forcing the Autobots to stop them and or vice versa. Each episode would eventually end with a confrontation between the warring conglomerates of giant robots as they seemingly float in midair with blasters firing - soon the involved Decepticons would retreat while the Autobots welcome a new member who helped turned the tide of the battle during its last minute. With the simplicities of the series, what made it awesome was't its paper thin plot, but its characters and the relationships therein - you had the loving camaraderie among the Autobots or rivalries within the Decepticons, you had Starscream's constant desire to dethrone Megatron, you had Optimus Prime as an ethical role model. These were the key elements that made the show work and that made it more than just a picture show of transforming machines. They were characters with morals, conflicts, and desires. But alas the film makers decided to bastardize these key elements and head into the direction where the movie adapted its source material in name only.
I understand that they couldn't make a direct adaptation of the original series, it just wouldn't work and frankly it would kind of suck if they did do that. So, if you're not going to focus your movie on Optimus Prime, Megatron and their respective band of big fucking giant robots and instead lead your focus towards a human element, one would expect to have a good human drama with big fucking robot action spliced within? I actually like the idea of focusing on humans within the Transformers mythos; there were humans in the original series, but none that held central focus.
Instead of giving us an engaging human point of view that invloved the world of Transformers, the film makers decide to bring in all this meaningless boring government shit. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't want to see how the pentagon would react and deal with the looming treat of transforming alien robots. As good as the military action sequences were, everything that involved the government and the characters therein was just fucking stupid. We're introduced to entire groups of characters who do absolutely nothing in the film. For example, the inclusion of Anthony Anderson who's brought in as the only hacker in the world who can figure out the meaning of a mysterious signal the Decepticons sent out during an attack. But to get there we have to sit through a painful introduction to his character that is meant to be funny but lacks heavily in that department and ends up being time consuming. While we're on the subject of hackers, an entire group of them is brought in at one point and they just kind of sit there, with the exception of this hot Australian chick (Possible plot for sequel: Australian chick and Megan Fox in a big fucking giant robot orgy?). All of this business is just boring, a complete waste of time, and adds nothing to the proceedings.
They should have just held off on all the government/military nonsense for later on in the movie and have kept its focus on the heart of the film, that being, Shia LaBeouf's storyline - a story about a boy and his car that happens to be a big fucking giant alien robot. They should have started the film with Shia's Sam Witwicky character running towards his Dad with A- paper plainly in sight and eventually getting his car (without all the Herbie gags or windows shattering or Bernie Mac shenanigans). We watch him fall in love with his shitty beat up yellow camaro and going after the girl - the driving her home sequence is fantastic. We watch as Sam and his car spend time together, bond. Though, the film makers decide to go the way of "the freak-out / my car is evil" line of storytelling - it just would have been much better if we could have witnessed Sam enjoying the notion of having his very own Transformer, that everything is just fucking cool, then when everything appears to be copasetic you can introduce some Decepticon bullying action, which would lead to the conflict, the dilemma of warring factions of robots that have made earth its battlefield.
That scene where Bumblebee is being tortured by Sector Seven didn't mean anything because nothing had been develop between the characters yet, there was no relationship built between the two to warrant the audience to evoke a reaction. This was no ET being taken away from Elliot moment, though it was trying to be. It's as if finding out that one of the nameless Stromtroopers in Star Wars had cancer and expecting us to care. The violin tinged mood music and Sam's emotional distraught deposition was not necessary or earned because we were so busy trying to establish the jarheads, the Air Force One bullshit, the code breakers, and the hackers instead of creating that bond between boy and alien machine.
They should have used the ET model, the Iron Giant model, when approaching this movie where we have our hero create a strong bond with his alien/robot counterpart so that their lies an emotional significance when the government tries to take his friend away. Sam Witwicky is the heart of the movie; he's Elliot, he's Hogarth, they should have used those characters as blueprints to construct a story where a boy discovers just how vast the universe really is, bonding with an alien from a distant planet who introduces him to the hidden world around us. Then the boy is shown just how terrifying that discovery is when he realizes that it isn't just about compassionate robots but that there also exists an entire breed of other robots that are set out to destroy not just the boy's robot or the Autobots, but all living creatures. The film needed to escalate, not just with battles, but the ideas behind the battles. It's just pace and development, two of the simplistic keys in storytelling.
Perhaps the worst thing about this movie and why I distaste it so much is its constant onslaught of embarrassingly unfunny jokes. It plays like a Family Guy episode with crude jokes with no laughs. Bumblebee doing his best R. Kelly impression? Was that really necessary? There are just too many of these horrid attempts at comedy to even write or acknowledge. This is what people find funny? really? What the fuck?
Also the movie lacks in the "awe" department, not so much us the audience but the characters within the movie. Aren't people supposed to be surprised to see giant fucking robots existing in the real world? There isn't a moment in this movie where you believe people are really reacting to seeing giant fucking robots. In Jurassic Park or in War of the Worlds you believed that these people were really having their minds blown by what was standing right in front of them. In Transformers they say things like "It's a robot. You know, like a super advanced robot. It's probably Japanese" and you're supposed to laugh. It's a fucking giant robot for fucks sakes, be fucking astounded at what your witnessing it's not as if giant fucking robots are a commonality in today's world.
Futhermore, Would it be safe to say that this movie is also kind of racist? You see they appear to make the Autobot character of Jazz into a black stereotype with his opening line of dialogue akin to "Yo yo yo wusssuuup, Autobots. Represent!" all the while having him break-dance as he transforms. The kicker in all this is that the next time you see this character is at the end when Optimus Prime is casually holding his broken-in-half corpse like it was nothing. The only significant Transformer death is that of the perceived black character? Though, none of the transformers (decepticons specifically) were development as characters so it didn't really matter if they've lived to see another movie.
What made Batman Begins, Alien(s), Terminator, and other movies of its kind so good was that it wasn't so much about batman, aliens, and robots but Bruce Wayne, Ripley, and Sarah Conner as characters and how they re-act to their respective unreal situations. How they develop as characters to go up againt unimaginable odds. And that's where the writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (it's not all Bay's fault) missed the mark, these were JJ Abrams writers, they wrote for Alias. I just expected better from those two. Why couldn't they just pace themselves in the effort to flesh out their characters to bring forth an engaing story so that when you bring in all the big fucking robot action it would be rightly satisfiying.
I wanted this movie to be all kinds of orgasmic glory of giant fucking robot action and a wicked story; it appears that it would only deliver on the former, at least that's more than most movies in Hollywood dare to give. At the end of the day Michael Bay's Transformers is essentially like a porn movie, just replace all the fucking with giant robots - it's all action, no story, and it appears for the majority of the movie going audience that's all they need to get by.
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