More Than Meets the Eye - My Transformers Review

More Than Meets the Eye - My Transformers Review

After attending two funerals this week (Flash and Captain America), it was time to lighten the mood a bit with some big-ass robots smashing each other up. Yes, I finally saw the Transformers movie.

With this flick, Michael Bay has managed to turn a 22-minute toy commercial two decades old into a 2 hour and 20-minute car commercial. And in typical Bay fashion, a lot of shit gets blowed up real good!

Here's the story in a nutshell, without any spoilers for those who haven't seen it yet: This totally annoying kid with totally annoying parents wants to buy a car so he can get in the pants of this girl who looks like Jennifer Connelly's younger sister, even though she hangs out with the in-crowd who basically treat this kid like shit. Why he would want anything to do with this girl is beyond me. I mean, at the beginning of the movie she's a complete bitch. Are you gonna tell me he can't find a hot geek chick? I see 'em at comic cons all the time! I know they're out there... then again, having been a totally annoying kid once, I understand how hard it can be.

So the kid gets a car, it turns out to be from another planet and... well, I'm going to assume you know the basic story of the Transformers, so I won't get into it here. It's tweaked a bit from the cartoon version. I've never read the comics, and I've only seen a few episodes of Beast Wars, and I don't know how many variations there are that probably all contradict each other, but in this version, the 'Formers are on earth searching for this cube which contains the Allspark.

Hot on the trail of these robots in disguise is a top secret government agency called Sector 7, the regular government, and America's daring highly-trained special mission force, G.I. Joe. Okay, it wasn't really G.I. Joe, but these guys were a lot like it. They didn't have code-names or anything, but they were each from a different branch of the armed forces, and they were clearly the best there was at what they did. It would be easy as pie to spin these guys off into a G.I. Joe movie... Tyrese Gibson as Roadblock? Why not?

So here's the deal: this movie is filled with a lot of really, really bad jokes. I know that bad jokes and cliches are just part of the game when it comes to a big-budget summer blockbuster, but these jokes were particularly bad. Almost bad enough to make me not like the movie. But then... yup, big fuckin' robots smashing the shit out of each other. Turning into cars, jets, tanks, even gigantic scorpions! As lame as the humans were, nothing could take away from the sheer delight of seeing real life Transformers. The good far outweighed the bad. And the story was good too. It wasn't overly complicated or anything - like I said, it was a 2+ hour version of a 22 minute toy commerical. But if you have fond memories of the Transformers, and you aren't a stickler for ridiculous details, you shouldn't have a problem with it.

Yes, there were some changes. Bumblebee is not a VW bug, Megatron is not a gun, etc, etc. I wasn't bothered one bit. Now, this could be because Transformers only held the #3 position in my Holy Trinity of 80's Toys (the #1 and 2 spots going to G.I. Joe and He-Man, respectively) so I really didn't care that much, or it could be because the core elements were still the same. They were from Cybertron, Optimus Prime was a super-honorable hero, Megatron was a villain, Bumblebee was our buddy and Starscream was a bitch. The basic ideas were still the same, and ... sweet Jesus-on-a-pogo-stick, people - find something worthwhile to complain about. It's a fucking movie based on a TOY.

And at the end of the day, I actually managed to care about that totally annoying kid and his bitch of a girlfriend. And isn't that what a good movie is supposed to make you do? Care about the characters? Well, this one did. And there were big robots too. That certainly didn't hurt.

source : www.comics2film.com