Reviews

Film Review - Transformers (2007)

When I was a kid, I was raised on television. I think that’s the way most children are brought up nowadays. And I can’t really blame the parents because most of these shows were pretty kickass. Thundercats, Yu-Gi-Oh! and my personal favourite Transformers. Transformers was a show which was created entirely to sell toys. It was violent, most of the time incomprehensible and IT WAS KICKASS!!! As a kids show, it was pretty damn good. I always watched Transformers on Saturday. Then it stopped showing up on TV and I forgot about it for a while. Then, in 2007, Paramount released a new movie directed by the King of Schlock himself, Michael Bay. Bay’s movies of the past were, apart from The Rock, made for teenage boys with extreme testosterone levels and never focused on the story. Easily, his worst movie was Pearl Harbour, which was directed in such an “AMERICA HELL YEAH!” sort of way that it disregarded historical fact and demonised the Japanese. So, could the King of Schlock pull of an adaptation of one of the most-loved TV shows of all time? Let’s find out.

The Good:                                                                                                                                               

The Visual Effects. The visuals and cinematography in this movie are some of the best in cinematic history. They look epic and make the film look much bigger than it is. This is one of the key factors of Bay’s films. The story and the characters may be stupid and uninteresting, but if the visuals look great, then he has them by the balls. Only film buffs and critics can really see this ploy and I’m glad I’m one of them.

The CGI. The CGI in this movie is really good. The Transformers did genuinely look like how I thought they would be. Their bodies are shiny and the transformations look great. Unfortunately, that’s where the good stuff ends because the rest is incredibly stupid.

The Bad:

The Plot. This story is so uninteresting. Basically, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf, Disturbia) finds an extra-terrestrial race of aliens from Cybertron called the Transformers, who are looking for the Allspark, a device which grants unlimited power to whoever has control of it. They have to find the Allspark and stop the Decepticons, the evil opposites of the Autobots, from taking it. So, that’s the basic plot. And if it sounds unoriginal and boring, that’s because it is. This is a quest based story and one that’ll have you bored to tears until the third act, when the Transformers finally fight. As a story opening to a franchise, it’s one of the worst.

The characters. I hate all of these characters. Witwicky is just good and boring. Megan Fox’s character is just hot. The most interesting character I can remember was Witwicky’s grandfather and he’s hardly in the movie! Even the f**king massive robots are uninteresting and are just painted as stereotypical heroes. Optimus Prime is just wise. And Jazz was the start of Bay’s long line of stereotypes in these movies, which is unhealthy and offensive.

The acting. Good god, the acting is so bad I thought about killing myself. Shia LaBoeuf’s acting ability is on par with watching grass grow. Megan Fox is just there to be hot and her voice sounds like nails rubbed against a chalkboard! And the rest of the acting was so uninteresting I forgot names. As for the Transformers, the do their parts okay. But it really broke my heart to hear Hugo Weaving really not care in this movie as the voice of Megatron. That was a sad day to hear Agent Smith not care.

The dialogue. The dialogue was written, I think, by a monkey because the dialogue is really, really bad. Hearing Jazz say “s’up bitches!” didn’t put a smile on my face, it just made me want to kill who wrote the dialogue that butchers the Transformers! The original dialogue wasn’t exactly high art either but at least it wasn’t racist, sexist and all-around stupid. The dialogue of the TV show was cool and epic. A kindergartner could have written better dialogue than this!

The lack of faith to the original show. There was no homage to the TV show. There was no Transformers theme at the end credits or original transformation sound effects. There was nothing apart from the Transformers themselves to show that this was a Transformers film. I hate the fact that Michael Bay took something so pure from our childhoods and squished it into a pulp.

Overall Verdict: 2/10 God-awful. This is a movie I have promised myself never to see again. I really don’t need to say anything other than don’t watch it. Watch the TV show because that is so much better. Unfortunately, people do like this movie and I respect their opinion but Bay only caters to the lowest common denominator. Rise above that and maybe the new TMNT movie won’t suck. And, good god, if the King of Schlock ruins that for me as well, I don’t know what I’ll do! GOD-AWFUL!