Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

So the Transformers movie is out, and I'm probably one of the biggest Transformers fans that most of the readers of this blog know, so I bet you're all wondering what I thought of it.

In a word, awful.

The Transformers themselves look awesome and some of the sequences involving them are spectacular, but the movie itself is so poorly paced and some of the so-called humour so monumentally inappropriate and unfunny that these sequences just can't redeem the movie. I'm sorry, but the sight of Bumblebee "lubricating" a human from his groinal socket isn't amusing, it's just in poor taste and not appropriate for the franchise. Nor was all the talk about masturbation.

After a promising and intriguing start to the film, the whole thing just drags on and on as Bumblebee spends most of the first half of the film helping the main human protaganist - a dorky teenager - score with the hottest girl in school. It's like one of those 80s screwball high school romance movies with Molly Ringwald or something.

Finally, the Autobots show up and proceed to look like idiots as they stumble all over the place attempting to hide from the kid's parents. Far from being proud intergalactic warriors, they look more like the Keystone Cops with all the slapstick going on.

The rest of the movie suffers from too much exposition and explanation before a very confusingly directed conclusion ends the whole sorry farce. Finally, while Peter Cullen is Optimus Prime to almost every fan, his voice just didn't convey enough emotion for me. He's good at "heroic speeches" but his lament over Jazz's death at the end of the film was entirely unconvincing.

This film could have been so much better if the script had been pruned of unessential parts and if Michael Bay got rid of all his slow-mo scene changes and action shots, but as it stands, it's a monumental disappointment on all but the most superficial level. Which makes me so very, very glad I didn't have to pay to watch it.

Posted in: chaosboy, transformers on August 15, 2007 at at 1:25:00 PM