So, who's going to see the Transformers film?
POSTED BY: Guywhowantsafireflyofhisown
UPDATED: Saturday, July 14, 2007 14:36
VIEWED: 10256
PAGE 3 of 5
One thing I liked that I heard so much complaining about prior to seeing it was the way they did Prime's face.
Yeah he had a mouth in the movie, and that just didn't feel right...until the battle scene's. Then the plates that covered his mouth and nose came up. I thought that was an awesome tip of the hat to the cartoons. 
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I get the whole "check your brain at the door" aspect. I guess I'm just burned out that that last three Transformers stories (Armada, Energon, and Cybertron) were utter garbage, and the one before them (Robots in Disguise) was mediocre at best. Especially after the absolute brilliance of the Beast-era.
[aside]
Not to mention that I've never understood why it should be in any way necessary or even acceptable to sacrifice quality and story logic in favour of "entertainment." I've always found well-told, coherent, and cohesive stories to be every bit as enjoyable as "mindless" entertainment. I don't like switching my mind off.
[/aside]
Transformers lends itself so perfectly to high-concept science-fiction (war drama, interstellar conflict, romance, comedy, the nature of the soul/spark), but nobody ever does anything with it (not since Beast Machines, anyway). It seems doomed to always be typecast as "something for the little kiddies." The movie was originally hyped to be something that would introduce Transformers to a more adult story, but it ended up just being the same old kiddie stuff, just with 40% more Extreeeeeeemm!!!(tm)
Ultimately, this move wasn't really different than a thousand other movies I've seen (and will see in the future), just with added Transformers. It wasn't really bad, it was just. . . not what it could've been.
Quote:
Originally posted by Kinetic:
You can't dislike the story and blame the director, it was written by Roberto Orci and John Rogers.
[. . .]
I found the special effects fine in scale and was interested in your interpretation of the physics...
Rogers, Orci, Kurtzman, and a host of other script-doctors, actually. All of them beholden to over-opinionated producers and loudmouthed, whiny fanboys (a good chunk of the cheese in this was how contrived everything was to shoehorn G1 references in --about a third of Prime's dialogue was soundbytes from the original series). And the Director does have say over how the story progresses, especially a director with as much clout as Bay.
It wasn't the scale of the FX (which I admit were beautifully-integrated), it was things like camera angles and frame composition (which are the purview of the director).
Remember the "reveal" of the ten-story-tall Allspark cube?
A straight-on shot, with the whole cube visible, and some tiny walkways holding tiny people. We quickly cut to a close-up of characters delivering dialogue, before the actual size of the Allspark has any time to register. We might as well be looking at a schematic diagram.
There are certain tricks to establishing scale; one of them is to have something in the foreground, or something moving from foreground to background, or angle the shot so that the focal object is skewed. Anything to establish some sort of point of reference and depth.
Compare this, frex, to Joss' work. Whenever we see a huge Reaver ship, or the lost city on Miranda, or Niska's skyplex, there's either Serenity herself to privide scale, or the camera is looking "up" or panning over the subject, or it lingers over the view long enough for it to sink in.
Same thing with the Transformers themselves: What we saw were usually just close-ups on a TF's head, then a close-up on a human with someone's knee or ankle in the background. How many shots were there where we got to see a full-body view, interacting with the environment (that lasted more than one second --fight sequences don't count). I can only recall a few (Bumblebee at the junkyard with his Botsignal, the introductions, the tableau of all the Autobots lounging around Sam's yard, Ice-Megatron's introduction, and the final scene of Prime on the hill).
Ice-Megatron is a good example: We see him from below, with the humans in the foreground (good), then cut to a human reaction shot (okay), then a close-up on Megatron (bad), then close-ups on all the humans as they speak (bad). There should've been a few wide-angle shots to show the size of the room, and maybe a crane
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I saw it on Monday night.
I dunno. I think I'm more of the audience this movie was targeted to. I never played with Transformers as a kid and never saw the cartoons or anything like that, so I ultimately didn't care about the liberties that they took with the source material.
Admittedly there were a few shots and reveals that Bay screwed up with, but I read in Ebert's review that Bay at heart isn't a fantasist. He's a demolition guy more interested in the artistry of giant robots beating the crap out of each other than some hokey "allspark" cube thing. I personally think that any of the more interesting and human aspects of the movie is probably Spielberg's influence. That being said, I actually do think the Autobots had personality, I did feel something when Bumblebee was almost destroyed, I thought Shia succeeded admirably in the thankless job of injecting some actual human emotion into it, and oddly enough I didn't mind the whole military angle, which normally is a big issue for me. Maybe it's because my brother's in Afghanistan, so I can't really slam the military anymore. I guess I realize now that soldiers are more or less working class guys, and the real blame should be on the crooked administration giving them orders. Or the fact that the soldier's are battling giant robots instead of slaughtering innocent women and children.
So all in all, I found it to be very enjoyable.
And Cybersnark, you are taking it WAY too seriously. You're making it sound like THE IRON GIANT.
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"The Transformers were a total slight against God. In as much as God sent his only begotten son to die on the cross to redeem mankind and all we did to pay him back was make terrible fucking cartoons, like the Transformers."
Randal Graves in CLERKS II
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Well, I'm about to start film school on Monday, so filmmaking is serious business for me. 
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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I agree with Cybersnark on a few points but this being a summer movie I'm not feeling overly critical.
Both Autobots and Decepticons needed more character development. The Decepticons had what, 10 lines of dialogue in the entire film? On the flip side there were way too many human characters being developed in the film. We really didn't need so many humans being thrown into the story, this is The Transformers movie after all.
My only other real gripe is that there is too much humor in the film. Granted, it's a kiddie cartoon movie but they could have dialed it down a few notches.
Having seen the original TV series in the wayback I had some concerns over the new characters designs. The only one that felt off was Megatron. If it hadn't been made clear who he was I never would have recognized him. One other thing, in the film there was a Decepticon by the name Devestator. If I'm not mistaken wasn't that the merged form of the Constructicons in the old cartoon series? That was a little odd.
Here's a minor gripe. I would have prefered if the Transformers had utilized more energy weapons, about 90% of the fighting was either projectile weaponry or hand to hand.
The positves far outweigh the negatives. Top notch CGI, great action sequences, and some really cool looking rides. As to the last part I don't know if I've ever seen more blatant product placement in a film. Chevy and Pontiac must be hoping to score big.
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We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
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Quote:
Originally posted by singate:
One other thing, in the film there was a Decepticon by the name Devestator. If I'm not mistaken wasn't that the merged form of the Constructicons in the old cartoon series? That was a little odd.
It says on wikipidia's page for Devastator that they made a mistake when doing the subtitles, and that the character was supposed to be named Brawl.
Why is the rum always gone?
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Which is actually kinda META. Except for the Beast Era, every TF series (including G1) has had some kind of name screwup (usually the result of characters having different names in the Japanese and English dubs).
It just wouldn't feel like Transformers without a name screwup.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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I've got a couple more questions.
Was there any footage at the end of the credits?
Select to view spoiler:
I saw the interview with Sam's parents but didn't stay beyond that. Was there anything important such as Megatron flickering back to life during his descent? I find it hard to believe that is dead after only one film.
Is it just me or did the trailers before the movie pretty much suck? That bizarre hand held mystery trailer was the only thing semi-interesting. Wonder what the hell that one is about.
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We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
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Select to view spoiler:
The credits had a scene of Starscream exiting Earth's atmosphere for parts unknown-but-probably-not-good.
Apparently you can see something falling off of him as he configures for spaceflight. Sadly, there's no Mal-esque "What was that?" line, so it's probably not a Serenity reference.
The J.J. Abrams movie is apparently called Cloverfield (possibly only in the same way that one of George Lucas' movies was called Blue Harvest
). Two websites are up: www.EthanHaaswasright.com, and www.EthanHaaswaswrong.blogspot.com. The first one has a puzzle that leads to raw video footage.Rumours abound that it could be a "Call of Cthulu" movie.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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I was pretty unimpressed.
Select to view spoiler:
I agree about the transformers themselves not getting enough characterization. They were just background characters for the most part. Which is annoying considering the movie is titled Transformers. There were a lot of scenes that could have gone away to leave time to grow the transformers role. We didn't need the whole long scene of looking for the glasses, autobots crushing the garden and the parents asking the kid if he was having fun time. Thanks but no thanks. The hacker subplot was annoying as well. It didn't move the plot along at all. Also "only one hacker in the world can break this code"...good thing he lives two blocks away. That was dumb. But speaking of dumb. "We kept this giant robot cryogenicly frozen and used him to reverse engineer stuff like the car". You had cryogenic freezing processes before the car!?! And what we decided to send that technology off to germany cause we didn't want to profit from it? Also let me end with "can you hotwire that computer overthere?" hotwire? computer?
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