We now return to "Battling Seizure Robots."
Finally, at the behest of my sister (after making her promise to watch District 9 with me when it comes out on DVD), I can count myself among those that have seen Transformers. Unfortunately, what has been seen cannot be unseen so now I must adapt to my new life as someone who has seen Transformers. It’s not going well, let me tell you.
It’s particularly hard to reconcile the fact that Michael Bay is a cinematic hack with the fact that he bathes in piles of money that he earned from his cinematic hackery. After a bout of some exceptionally bad dialogue about alien radio signals or something equally as tenuous, my sister said “Yeah, dialogue’s not very important in a Michael Bay movie. No one really cares what’s being said.” Well, I care! The dialogue helps drive the narrative and if the dialogue is crappy and unrealistic then it makes it hard to take the story seriously. And yeah, OK, it’s a movie about giant alien robots who disguise themselves as cars (American cars, of course. What else would they be, you Commie bastards?) but there are plenty of movies with similarly absurd plot lines in which dialogue was not simply an afterthought; Star Wars, the new Star Trek film, District 9 as mentioned above, just to name a few. It is entirely possible to have both incredible special effects and thought-provoking dialogue and if Michael Bay can’t do it himself, then he should hire someone with his billions and billions of dollars to do it for him! I am not going to just accept two-hours of CG’d explosions as good entertainment. No, I demand more from the movies I choose to watch.
P.S. Despite my best efforts to tear the film apart as I watched it, my sister did come up with the best critique. In regards to the hot Australian computer analyst chick: “There’s no way an Australian would be able to decode computer signals. She’d be drunk.” Her words, not mine.
It’s particularly hard to reconcile the fact that Michael Bay is a cinematic hack with the fact that he bathes in piles of money that he earned from his cinematic hackery. After a bout of some exceptionally bad dialogue about alien radio signals or something equally as tenuous, my sister said “Yeah, dialogue’s not very important in a Michael Bay movie. No one really cares what’s being said.” Well, I care! The dialogue helps drive the narrative and if the dialogue is crappy and unrealistic then it makes it hard to take the story seriously. And yeah, OK, it’s a movie about giant alien robots who disguise themselves as cars (American cars, of course. What else would they be, you Commie bastards?) but there are plenty of movies with similarly absurd plot lines in which dialogue was not simply an afterthought; Star Wars, the new Star Trek film, District 9 as mentioned above, just to name a few. It is entirely possible to have both incredible special effects and thought-provoking dialogue and if Michael Bay can’t do it himself, then he should hire someone with his billions and billions of dollars to do it for him! I am not going to just accept two-hours of CG’d explosions as good entertainment. No, I demand more from the movies I choose to watch.
P.S. Despite my best efforts to tear the film apart as I watched it, my sister did come up with the best critique. In regards to the hot Australian computer analyst chick: “There’s no way an Australian would be able to decode computer signals. She’d be drunk.” Her words, not mine.