Actually a serious breakdown of the movie now that I have seen it twice, but first a comment about movie screens.
Right now in Minneapolis it costs about $9 a person to see a movie. It costs slightly less than that (7 or 8) at my parents suburb of St. Louis. And, before a movie we see literally 20+ minutes of commercials and previews after the time when the movie is supposed to start. WTF! Why the hell do I pay you for advertising, followed by product-placement filled movies.
This seems outrageous to me, and is very annoying….especially since the commercials mostly suck.
Also, the second time I saw the movie, the screen / print of the movie really sucked. And the quality really detracted from my enjoyment the second time around. Again, why should I pay you, if you can’t even clean the window to the projector, and make sure there isn’t shit all over the film print.
Now, on with our regularly scheduled program.
First off, I really enjoyed this movie, both times I saw it. But less so the second.
Second, I’m a huge fan of the old cartoon, and a huge fan of the concept of robots in disguise as trucks and cars and stuff.
Third, a lot has been said about the lack of character development in this movie. I want to go on the record for saying I disagree with most of those comments, but understand their sentiment….especially about Jazz.
OK, so this movie is all about a big-ass cube crashing to earth, and this big-ass cube is the “All spark” or the thing that makes robots come to life. And, the big twist is of course that megatron has been on earth for like a gazillion years cuz he crash landed in the north pole and got froze there.
This macguffin chase is a perfectly acceptable premise for a transformers movie. The original movie was little more of a basic extension of the “Must of energy (energon) from the resource rich planet Earth, so we are fighting an intergalactic civil war” into the “Must get the Matrix so that it cannot kill Unicron”. It was a simple setup for the beginning, then we had the pre-climax into the turn when Optimus and Megatron fought (arguably the best animated fight scene ever), and then the middle was all about the introduction of the matrix followed by a chase scene, then the end is the resolution of the subplots, turning back into a single plot and using the matrix to kill unicron.
Simple, same idea, all about energy and a macguffin.
This movie, same format. Begining is about the introduction of the boy, the girl, and the car. The turn is when the autobots all arrive, followed by the introduction of the macguffin (the “All spark”), the big chase / race to the all spark. (I liken the Sector 7 people to the Junkions) Then we get a collapse of all subplots into a single plot-line (the clean-up) and a final battle.
Simple, summer action movie.
Now, does that mean it is perfect because in many ways it mimics the original. Of course not.
Lets start with the Aussie hot blond working for the NSA. WTF!?!?! Since when does anything related to the DoD hire people with accents for top secret analysis. BTW, the analysis, don’t even get me started.
I found the anti-hacker, signal which makes noise, characters embedded in the signal, bullshit to be the single most insulting part of the movie. This section could have been completely removed and it would have not even come close to hurting the movie. It felt like they didn’t have enough hollywood blond in the thing so they felt compelled to do that…plus they had the angry black guy, the black transformer, so they must have needed an excuse for the comic relief minority, so I figure that played in there as well.
Lose that part, you take 15 minutes off the movie, and the secretary of defense just naturally follows the sequence of events w/o blond girl interruption.
Let me step aside now and tell you a little about signal analysis. If you take the time to learn that a Fourier transform is part of signal analysis (something blond girl mentions directly in the movie) then you also know that there is no way a basic frequency transform would ever do anything to a digital signal. Also, digital signals, or any signal transformed and super-hetrodyned to be transferred over long distances, DO NOT MAKE AUDIBLE NOISE BY THEMSELVES!
Now, in a movie with giant talking robots it is a wonder why I would even care about this.
It is simple. Transformers, the concept, the themes, everything, is about contrast. It is about human vs. machine, really good vs. really evil, simple mechanics vs. hyper-advanced robots, technologically developing vs. super-developed technorganics.
It actually chips away at the contrast when you make the humans do unrealistic things by themselves. If they had partnered w/ the transformers to do something, then it is a whole new ballgame. But by themselves, and with such varying levels of stupidity and brilliance (compare blond girl and black comedian to the rest of the DoD if you don’t get what I’m saying here), you weaken the human dynamic in the movie, and make the human-caused destruction of megatron look sillier than before. For example…it is silly to try to create contrast by having a guy take an old Apple IIe and to hard-wire it to an old radio to transmit morris code. It is just unnecessary. They already have old-school walkie-talkies and stuff (BTW if you are a super-advanced technological life form which can jam newer digital wireless communications it is just as simple to jam analog communications)
Ok, so besides that gripe, where I thought the still 1-dimensional character of the hacker girl is actually over developed (where it shouldn’t have existed at all), I felt like most of the rest of the main characters was appropriately developed for a transformers movie, and a summer action movie. The boy was funny, nervous, a bit silly, but brave and came into his own right. I actually felt the Bumblebee-Sam connection, which is more than I can say for Daniel in the old movie. (I want him to die so badly every time I watch the old movie….I keep hoping it somehow changes magically)
So, let me summarize quickly my thoughts on the whole movie:
Pros:
– Transformations all were badass
– Bumblebee didn’t suck
– Optimus was not crappy in any way (still gave me warm fuzzies when he said “One shall stand and one shall fall”
– Optimus killed a guy w/ a giant heated-up sword thing and i was like “HOLY SHIT OPTIMUS JUST RIPPED THAT DUDES HEAD OFF!!!!!!”
– Iron Hide was badass
– Action scenes – especially the one with Starscream, were absolutely amazing and perfect in representing what a transforming robot would fight like. Lauren even pointed this out as one of here favorite parts of the movie.
– The kid was funny, the parents were funny. They were cheesy some, and the parents were definitely one dimensional, but who cares, it was fun.
– The love interest was a solid brunette. We who are married to brunettes or just favor brunettes in general solute you for your bold anti-hollywood blockbuster norm decision.
– Soundwave was something akin to a really awesome combo of all the original cassette tapes
– The police car decepticon, but I’ll let Lauren elaborate on that since she brought it up.
– The decepticons were so scary I nearly peed my pants when Megatron did nasty and / or badass things … he looked like something out of your imagination from when you were a child and there was a monster in the bedtime story….or maybe something like what I imagined Grendel to look like.
Cons:
– More Starscream….never thought I’d hear myself say that
– More Megatron. What is his greater motivation…I’ve always wondered that. Really nasty bad guys don’t get that nasty and that power hungry w/o being picked on as a kid or hit by their parents….so what is a technological life-form’s motivation for controlling an unlimited power source so that he can take over the galaxy, or is that motivation enough in itself?
– Ending, where they dumped the bodies in the ocean…stupid. We all know that the end of season 1 of the show ends w/ the decepticons crashing into the ocean and staging a base from there. So the sequal is obvious.
– the black transformer died….this is worse than killing Tyrese or the comedian guy. Plus Jazz is one of my all-time favorite transformers, and he even survived the original movie when Ironhide, Ratchet, and Wheeljack died.
– Giant inter-galactic war-causing cube of infinite power shrinks down to power that fits in your hands…WTF?
– Blond Hacker-girl. I’ve already covered her silliness.
– Devastator is dead already? And he wasn’t a combination of all the construticons. You could have just used a different name for big-ass tank dude and saved that for the sequel w/ actual devastator.
– The end pointed to a sequel, but the movie wasn’t written well enough to sustain a good sequel. I think we can all agree on this, but feel free to point out to me a way in which Micheal Bay can make two movies in a row that don’t suck.
Notice how I leave out character development of everyone except Megatron or Starscream. This is because I cared zero about everyone else who didn’t get much screen time, and of the people that did get screen time I felt like they got enough development for the already long 2.5 hr run time of this movie….especially since it was all designed to lead towards shit blowing up.
I still give this movie an enthusiastic “Fuck Yeah, Transformers!”, but after a second viewing the killing of Jazz and the blond girl make it slightly less enthusiastic. Overall, the hacker girl should have gone all together, thus creating further and more interesting contrast between the transformers and the humans in a more believable way, and they should have had more Starscream and Megatron and got to the ass-whooping faster.