Transform and roll out!
URGA MOTW
Transformers
I was a young child in the 80's. I watched Transformers (the cartoon) on Saturday mornings when I was growing up. I loved it, and all those other great cartoons too. (If you know of the song The Breakfast Club by Z-Trip, well I remember the vast majority of those shows, even if I've not experienced most of those US breakfast 'cereals'. Of course, the lyrics do adult-er-cize the shows a fair bit :p)
In recent years, I did get a chance to rewatch a bit of the Transformers cartoon and was ashamed to realise how dumb and silly it is. But anyway, the childhood memories are good, and when there's a live-action movie announced to be in the works, you're either wetting your pants with excitement or being highly cynical that they can do it any justice. I must admit I am usually in the latter camp, and definitely was so for Transformers, especially with Michael Bay (The Island, Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) attached as director.
Early reports of the Transformers movie looked promising, and they certainly promoted it well... cool trailers, pictures and action sequences, and not having the Transformers speak at all in the clips we saw. Hearing that the original Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) had joined the voice cast was definitely promising. Small disappointments when learning that things weren't exactly the same - Bumblebee wasn't going to be a VW Beetle, Megatron wouldn't change into a gun, and other minor bits and pieces.
Well... as enkorvaks and motokomaharet have already stated... There is not enough awesome in the word awesome to describe how awesome it was :)
With a movie like this, it's not expected that the plot needs to be anything special, but it still needs to make sense. So here's the quick summary: A big cube called the Allspark fell to Earth thousands of years ago, and Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, followed it cos he wants to use it to take over the universe. But he got frozen. Other Decepticons are on Earth too trying to find Megatron and the Allspark. Blackout (a helicopter) destroys a US Military base in Qatar trying to hack it, and later Soundbite (a cd player-cum-mobile phone) does similarly on Air Force One.
In the meantime, young Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), great grandson of the arctic explorer who stumbled upon Megatron, has just bought his first car, which turns out to be Autobot Bumblebee, sent to protect him and find the map to the Allspark so that the Autobots can destroy it to prevent the Decepticons from getting their hands on it. The map to finding it was burned by Megatron onto Sam's great grandfather's glasses, which he's trying to flog on Ebay....
Yep, it's a silly plot, but no more silly than the majority of the Transformers cartoon episodes. Most of this is explained by Optimus Prime once he is introduced to Sam (in the middle of the film) and all the exposition is over with VERY quickly in between some fantastic action sequences full of explosions.
And after all, what did we want to see with a Transformers movie? Rockem Sockem Robots made gigantic. And this movie delivers in spades. Almost half the film is adrenalin pumping action and severely cool special effects of Decepticons fighting humans and Autobots fighting Decepticons.
And in between the action sequences, how can they keep us interested? By making it *incredibly* funny. The scriptwriters have done a damn good job with this script. It has some incredibly corny dialogue, but it just fits so well that it can be forgiven. Most of the 'human' subplot with a barrage of undeveloped characters is brilliant purely because it is done with dialogue that has you laughing out loud. It's not particularly intelligent or witty, but it is funny! Even most of the transformers have underdeveloped characters, with the possible exceptions of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Soundbite. Even then, it's not like it matters, because seeing them all attacking each other is what it's all about, and it looks amazing.
Bad points? Welll I've kind of covered them - silly plot, no depth to the characters, corny dialogue, and the occasionally shaky camera work (handheld?) can be a little hurtful to the eye and make it hard to see the action... but all of these are forgiveable because it is purely a superduper action flick, and it's not even *trying* to be real. But it is still fairly internally consistent and believable.
In fact, the hardest thing to believe is the fact that the USA has a fairly competent Secretary of Defence (Jon Voight) :)
This one may be worth seeing a second time in the cinema, but I'm not certain I'll have the time with all the other cool movies coming out in July...
9/10 - " Holy crap, that's a very good score for a silly movie", you might say. But it's well deserved - this film lives entirely up to its expectation and hype, and very little disappoints.
Sure it's different to the cartoons... but having actually watched some of them as an adult, I'm glad they threw out a lot of the silliness and invented their own silliness!
PS. The GU has finally put a head on its Optimus Prime model... motokomaharet has the photo, I'll upload it soon.
Transformers
I was a young child in the 80's. I watched Transformers (the cartoon) on Saturday mornings when I was growing up. I loved it, and all those other great cartoons too. (If you know of the song The Breakfast Club by Z-Trip, well I remember the vast majority of those shows, even if I've not experienced most of those US breakfast 'cereals'. Of course, the lyrics do adult-er-cize the shows a fair bit :p)
In recent years, I did get a chance to rewatch a bit of the Transformers cartoon and was ashamed to realise how dumb and silly it is. But anyway, the childhood memories are good, and when there's a live-action movie announced to be in the works, you're either wetting your pants with excitement or being highly cynical that they can do it any justice. I must admit I am usually in the latter camp, and definitely was so for Transformers, especially with Michael Bay (The Island, Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) attached as director.
Early reports of the Transformers movie looked promising, and they certainly promoted it well... cool trailers, pictures and action sequences, and not having the Transformers speak at all in the clips we saw. Hearing that the original Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) had joined the voice cast was definitely promising. Small disappointments when learning that things weren't exactly the same - Bumblebee wasn't going to be a VW Beetle, Megatron wouldn't change into a gun, and other minor bits and pieces.
Well... as enkorvaks and motokomaharet have already stated... There is not enough awesome in the word awesome to describe how awesome it was :)
With a movie like this, it's not expected that the plot needs to be anything special, but it still needs to make sense. So here's the quick summary: A big cube called the Allspark fell to Earth thousands of years ago, and Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, followed it cos he wants to use it to take over the universe. But he got frozen. Other Decepticons are on Earth too trying to find Megatron and the Allspark. Blackout (a helicopter) destroys a US Military base in Qatar trying to hack it, and later Soundbite (a cd player-cum-mobile phone) does similarly on Air Force One.
In the meantime, young Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), great grandson of the arctic explorer who stumbled upon Megatron, has just bought his first car, which turns out to be Autobot Bumblebee, sent to protect him and find the map to the Allspark so that the Autobots can destroy it to prevent the Decepticons from getting their hands on it. The map to finding it was burned by Megatron onto Sam's great grandfather's glasses, which he's trying to flog on Ebay....
Yep, it's a silly plot, but no more silly than the majority of the Transformers cartoon episodes. Most of this is explained by Optimus Prime once he is introduced to Sam (in the middle of the film) and all the exposition is over with VERY quickly in between some fantastic action sequences full of explosions.
And after all, what did we want to see with a Transformers movie? Rockem Sockem Robots made gigantic. And this movie delivers in spades. Almost half the film is adrenalin pumping action and severely cool special effects of Decepticons fighting humans and Autobots fighting Decepticons.
And in between the action sequences, how can they keep us interested? By making it *incredibly* funny. The scriptwriters have done a damn good job with this script. It has some incredibly corny dialogue, but it just fits so well that it can be forgiven. Most of the 'human' subplot with a barrage of undeveloped characters is brilliant purely because it is done with dialogue that has you laughing out loud. It's not particularly intelligent or witty, but it is funny! Even most of the transformers have underdeveloped characters, with the possible exceptions of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Soundbite. Even then, it's not like it matters, because seeing them all attacking each other is what it's all about, and it looks amazing.
Bad points? Welll I've kind of covered them - silly plot, no depth to the characters, corny dialogue, and the occasionally shaky camera work (handheld?) can be a little hurtful to the eye and make it hard to see the action... but all of these are forgiveable because it is purely a superduper action flick, and it's not even *trying* to be real. But it is still fairly internally consistent and believable.
In fact, the hardest thing to believe is the fact that the USA has a fairly competent Secretary of Defence (Jon Voight) :)
This one may be worth seeing a second time in the cinema, but I'm not certain I'll have the time with all the other cool movies coming out in July...
9/10 - " Holy crap, that's a very good score for a silly movie", you might say. But it's well deserved - this film lives entirely up to its expectation and hype, and very little disappoints.
Sure it's different to the cartoons... but having actually watched some of them as an adult, I'm glad they threw out a lot of the silliness and invented their own silliness!
PS. The GU has finally put a head on its Optimus Prime model... motokomaharet has the photo, I'll upload it soon.