I really had only very modest expectations for this movie, and yet it still seemed to disappoint even those. Lame.
dyalander wrote:but to me it's called "Transformers" not "Dickhead humans" I wanted a movie about transformers
That was certainly one major problem - the humans had all the good parts, and the Transformers were mostly just eye-candy in a movie about humans. The robots showed up relatively late in the film and barely had any personalities - all the Autobots seemed to be pretty simple stereotypes, and even then had very few lines. Optimus Prime had the most lines, but he's kind of stiff anyway. Bumblebee seemed to portray some personality, but didn't actually get to really speak till the end. Sam Whitwicki started out pretty annoying, though I grew to like him some by the end. The two main guys on the Special Forces team were pretty cool. But almost all the other humans... I actually thought that they were written and acted pretty well, but they were so completely pointless. They served no real role. That scene where they used the old radio to transmit something or other to the jets... was completedly meaningless and totally tacked-on just to give them something to do. None of that code-breaking stuff in the beginning, which seemed kind of cool and mysterious, actually amounted to anything meaningful either. The whole bit with Captain Whitwicki's glasses, that was all pretty lame and meaningless too, as the glasses where supposed to have encoded where the cube was, but the cube had been moved after all that happened anyway, and everybody actually found the cube without the aid of the glasses anyway. Actually, the Autobots were all headed towards the Dam after examining the glasses... and that didn't make any sense, since Megatron's navigation stuff was imprinted on the glasses BEFORE the cube was moved to the dam...
dyalander wrote:There were continuity errors
I figure that must be what you're talking about...
Dyalander wrote:constant camera movement
Yeah, I didn't like that style either. Compare it to the better fight scenes in the Matrix, like Neo's subway showdown with Agent Smith... the camera-work in The Matrix lets you actually observe all the cool moves they do while fighting. In Transformers frenetic style you can barely tell whats actually going on because the camera moves so much and focuses in too close alot. I hate that kind of fight-scene. Its like Batman Begins - Liam Neeson can't actually do a good fight scene, so they just had alot of fancy camera movements and focus the camera in much to close on one arm making a punch and another blocking it, and the result is you can barely actually see the fighting. Similar crap techniques were used in Daredevil, as Ben Afflect can't actually fight... but I can't even understand why they would need to do that in a movie where all the combatants are computer generated robots. It was just lame.
I didn't even really like the robots. As vehicles they were cool, and the transitions from robot to vehicle and back were okay, but as robots alot of them looked pretty much the same. I had trouble telling Megatron apart from Starscream when they were in robot form, and speaking of Megatron and Starscream: one of the things that was good about the original concept was that the characters all had unique and outsized personalities, and personality conflicts too, Megatron and Starscream being pretty much the best examples of that. And yet, in this movie, they displayed very little personality of any sort. Megatron wasn't even in the movie till near the end, and then had only a few lines. Starscream had far fewer than even Megatron's paltry lines. I think about the only thing he said at all was something like "I live to serve you, lord Megatron." He didn't fight with him or plot against him or anything.
A movie with heros NEEDS a good villain, and without it, well, it just sucks. Thats why "Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan" was the only really good Trek movie, because its the only one with a villain thats a good match, in terms of personality and acting, to the hero. Its like, imagine Star Wars if you took away almost all of Darth Vader and the emporer's lines, cut half their scenes, and made them look less interesting and about the same... Imagine "The Matrix" if Neo didn't have somebody as cool as Agent Smith to contend with. If you cut most of Smith's lines out, like the scene where he interrogates Morpheus, it just wouldn't be that great. Villains, man, gotta have good strong villains. Tranformers didn't pay enough attention to the villains.
The only characters in Transformers who really played the villian role were the Sector 7 guy, and that very small Decepticon. The Sector 7 guy was, like many of the other humans, mostly pointless, and the small robot was, well, I don't know, kind of cool, but also a little too silly, behaving all like a psychotic housepet or something.
I know I'm pretty hard to please, but its like they weren't even trying with this turky. I didn't have that much good to say about "300", but this makes "300" seem pretty good by comparison.
When was the last time there was a sci-fi or fantasy film that didn't disappoint? Its been several years at least. And in that time, television has actually been kicking the crap out of Hollywood on the sci-fi, fantasy, and intrigue fronts. Thats pretty pathetic of Hollywood, that they're being so badly outdone by t.v. I hope they figure that out and turn it around soon, but I won't hold my breath for it.
