Book reviews, art, gaming, Objectivism and thoughts on other topics as they occur.

Jul 5, 2007

Transformers

I just got back from seeing this movie and I am so happy I went to see it. It was an action movie, it was totally melodrama, but oh it was good melodrama. It is so rare to see a movie so full of explosions and meaningful dialog and hilarious comedy; it's simply a delight for the senses. Oh, before I forget: SPOILERS. THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. Yeah!

Now there are one or two criticisms I could make, like the fact that it was kind of dopey how the Sector Seven nincompoop basically said all human technology was reverse-engineered from Megatron . . . what was up with that? Bah. It was totally unworthy of such an excellent movie to make a statement like that, but it was only like 2 seconds of the entire movie so nevermind.

I really liked how Optimus Prime really had the power of his convictions; he was absolutely willing to pay the ultimate price to uphold them. Plus the voice they used for him was awesome, Peter Cullen, who also voiced Optimus Prime in the cartoon series. Personally I think HE should have been called the "leading man", but then I'm a sucker for a military man with a good voice. He was also the voice of King Kong, another impressively masculine character. Why are the best men robots and apes? Nah, on second thought, don't answer that. I'm not sure I want to know.

I also like how (don't forget I said SPOILERS) they didn't cheese out the ending and kill Optimus. I was all set for it, I was ready to cringe and be pissed off, and boom! Someone thinks for two seconds and we have The Happy Ending Extraordinary. Oh, it was good. Everyone in the theater clapped at the end, I haven't been to a movie where people clapped in a long time!

It was also very nice how the military was portrayed as being competent, the Men in Black were shown as jerks, the Secretary of Defense was a cool guy, there was a nifty girl hacker . . . I could go on and on but you'd probably be better off just going to see the movie already.

Have fun!

3 comments:

Apollo said...

I havent read your whole review because I don't want to ruin the movie for myself. But you got me exited and I cant wait to see it!

Anonymous said...

It'll be interesting to see whree they go with the sequels. I won't be surprised if they have Unicron turn up (that guy seems to turn up a lot since the '86 movie...

Jennifer Snow said...

Hmm. Sequels? I wonder if it'll follow the tendency of other similar movie series like Spiderman and Fantastic 4 and the second one will be better than the first.

There have been a number of complaints about stylistic elements of the movie, and anyone that found those elements annoying didn't enjoy it very much. I did, though.

The "getting the team together" or "acquiring powers" part of the plot always seems to be the worst, too, a prequel to an actually interesting and enjoyable plot. So who knows?