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Transformers: the Movie (dir. Michael Bay, 2007) - SPOILERS

 
  

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All Acting Regiment
13:25 / 06.08.07
The racism was the real problem, here. Everything else was just par for the course with this kind of film - well made, but none the less, fairly bad in different ways at the same time; with things that were quite fun - and none of this unexpected. See also the recent Star Wars etc.

The racism was the real problem - it was just absolutely uncalled for. People have mentioned the way the black characters were treated, but a major problem for me was that hispanic soldier who insists on talking Spanish, in a combat situation ffs, and being told off for it by the sensible white men - as if this is what the Spanish-language controversy in the US boils down to - foreign people, being silly.
 
 
Benny the Ball
14:41 / 06.08.07
From a purely story telling point of view, the greatest problem for me was the reveal of the other Autobots - it was done too early, IMO. The story would have worked better if more of a bond was made between Bumblebee and Spike (was that even his name in the film, or am I blurring with the old series? Oh, it was Sam wasn't it - Spike was the son - digress etc).

What worked well was the opening in the desert - in that it showed how little the Decepticons cared for human life, but soon fell apart and became some kind of 'Join the Army' wank fest.
The Police-car, Barricade and Sam's first encounter - didn't like the running away from his own car part, but Bumblebee saving Sam worked well.
Optimus on the Freeway - imagine if that was the first time you saw Prime - not as some bumbling fool hiding in a garden, but as the best Autobot soldier, saving the day and taking out a Decepticon.
Starscream attacking the other jets - great idea, a bit messy, but still good.

The rest was just a mess - I couldn't tell who was fighting and when and what they were doing for half the film - couldn't believe how stupid the script was. Prime and Megatron's face off was a massive let down - dropping the lines from their fight in the animated movie wasn't really enough when all that seemed to happen was that Prime fell on the floor and offered to sacrifice himself.

It was just a mess, ultimately, before you even get onto the problems with the human characters.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:59 / 06.08.07
(was that even his name in the film, or am I blurring with the old series? Oh, it was Sam wasn't it - Spike was the son - digress etc).

Sparkplug father, Spike or Buster (cartoon and comic) son, Daniel grandson. Sam movie.

It's possibly telling that you don't recall the name of one of the main characters, though - I only found out that Maggie Madsen _had_ a name from IMDB.
 
 
Benny the Ball
15:11 / 06.08.07
I spent half the film trying to remember the names of other transformers...
 
 
The Natural Way
17:05 / 06.08.07
Oh, the 'stop speaking spanish' thing really, really pissed me off. But what about the sexism? Male gaze? More like 13 year old boy gaze.

But, no, I don't think everything else was 'par for the course...'. To my mind Transformers was an exceptionally bad summer blockbuster, something which, as Boboss points out, these films need not be.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:57 / 06.08.07
"Fig" is an interesting character, or more precisely not an interesting character at all, and again feels like a late addition or maybe just a throw-in. He doesn't do anything very much - Epps calls in airstrikes, Lennox runs the show - except speak Spanish and be terrified. I don't want to blame the film when it could have been my own aesthetic overload, but I can't actually recall whether he survives Skorponok - if he does, his character just disappears after that, right?
 
 
Seth
20:59 / 06.08.07
I differ here in that I have no expectation for any summer blockbuster to be a good film. All I really wanted from this was something that I'd enjoy as spectacle and that at least attempted to evoke something I loved as a kid, and something that would make ridiculous amounts of money so that Hollywood stays true to bandwagon form and greenlights Evangelion. It achieved all three (although we'll have to wait and see on Eva, which no one will have the balls to film as it is and will face major changes, I'd just be really interested to see how it's approached).

Regarding the racism and sexism, it's no worse or better than a lot else that I've seen, even recently (Jesus, did you see 300?). That's not a defence of the film, and I guess you have to start singling things out somewhere...

My non-Barbelith mates have almost unilaterally loved Transformers without reservation so far, and given the business that the film has made I think our Film, TV and Theatre forum wishing for intelligent blockbusters is a comparatively small minority compared to people (myself included) who view coherence, subtlety, complexity and economy as optional extras with this type of movie. There's no shortage of great films being made, although I sometimes wonder at the shortage of great films being talked about on these pages. The threads for The Host and Zodiac spring instantly to mind (both are fabulous movies that deserve more discussion), compared to this monstrosity being at nine pages before the film is even out. I wonder how much people on Barbelith were fatigued by this film before it even opened. Not that I have a problem with pre-release discussion, it's fun to take the piss out of but it's pretty inevitable given the way news is leaked and films are marketed these days.
 
 
Dead Megatron
02:15 / 07.08.07
I don't want to blame the film when it could have been my own aesthetic overload, but I can't actually recall whether he survives Skorponok - if he does, his character just disappears after that, right?

He did survive, but was severly wounded in the final showdown against Skorponok, so after that, yes, he disappeared from the film.
 
 
Spaniel
08:28 / 07.08.07
Jesus, did you see 300?

Pretty sure Pigs hasn't. Don't think he engages with too much unfiltered popular culture these days hence the strength of his reaction to the racism and misogyny in Transformers.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
08:40 / 07.08.07
Also, 300 is kind of almost explicitly fascist: the fields of corn blowing in the wind as the soldier says goodbye to his wife and child and goes off to fight the darkies, the fucking eugenics... Compared to that, the problematic racial stereotype based comedy of Transformers seems tame, but then so does pretty much anything else. And a lot of the racial stereotype based comedy is problematic in a more complex way than particularly English white audiences might get - because sure, Bernie Mac's audience isn't just white people, and there are reasons why his comedic cameos are often broadly the same guy. It's very tricky to unpick this stuff - I'm not sure I'm the person to do it.
 
 
Automatic
06:54 / 09.08.07
This is the first film in a few years I walked out of. Pure unadulterated rubbish, not a single redeeming point as far as I can see.

I can completely understand Pigs' derision for anyone that enjoyed this shit.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
11:15 / 09.08.07
Yeah...not much to add, except to add my voice to the dissappointed hoardes. Unadulterated chode. I actually slapped my forehead in disgust a few times.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
13:05 / 09.08.07
That said, hearing Optimus' voice again did make me very happy.
 
 
Hieronymus
22:12 / 12.08.07
It's been a while (since the movie was released and) since I visited The Editing Room.

But damn if that site doesn't always make things better.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
20:08 / 14.08.07
Cocking hell.

I don't mind if you didn't like it. Really I don't. And I can emphathise with a lot of the reasons why some of you hated it. I don't agree, but I can emphathise.

But Nigel Christ, telling us that we're dicks for liking it... you're a fucking tool, and you've wrecked your own review by saying so. You're just Ain't It Cool with a vocabulary. Fuck OFF.

It's a summer tentpole movie based on characters and situations I loved when I was a kid. It did everything I wanted it to, and I thought it was fantastic. Still do. You disagree? Fine. I'm happy with that. I'm not that insecure that I feel the need to belittle other people for seeing and experiencing something different than me, or for having different reasons for doing so. If you think you're still justified in doing so, for whatever reason, then frankly you're not worth talking to about this film, and maybe any other. And Seth's right - where are you lot on these pages when there's a genuinely awesome movie to rave about? At least I barely post here anymore, so I have an excuse for a lack of positive contribution...
 
 
Feverfew
21:00 / 14.08.07
It did everything I wanted it to,

That's my feeling on it. There are elements of it I didn't like, and elements that I thought were excellent, and they're pretty much in proportion to what's been said above.

Talk of a sequel is going on, and apparently they've thought of a "really good way" to get the Dinobots in.
 
 
Seth
23:35 / 14.08.07
Fucking wicked. I was hoping for the Dinobots, in that I reckon they should use the same holograms that gave the Deceptions their drivers/pilots to make them look like real dinosaurs.

Cinema desperately needs Dinobots.

And Insecticons.

Anyone who disagrees is a wanker.
 
 
Shiny: Well Over Thirty
06:51 / 15.08.07
Dinobots in the sequal. That's so fucking right, it's almost gone all the way through right to the other side and become wrong! Wonder if it'll be a Dinobots and Shockwave kind of deal.
 
 
The Natural Way
11:08 / 15.08.07
Chill out, Hellbunny, I apologised a little bit further up the page and I honestly don't think you're a dick or whatever - never really did. Just being a bit fighty was all.

Still think Transformers was rubbish tho'. Really, really rubbish.
 
 
Thorn Davis
13:07 / 15.08.07
I thought Transformers was good in an old fashioned sort of way. You know, when people used to go to the cinema to watch the moon get hit in the face by a rocket, or the train coming into the station. Sheer spectacle. The story was just there because a lot of films seem to have them these days. These big summer spectacles are always there to remind us what cinema came from, and what at it's very core it is: special effects.
 
 
Blake Head
20:46 / 02.09.07
Didn’t like the design of some of the main transformers: Megatron seemed to be a vaguely spiky evil robot, Prime and his strange mouth just didn’t look iconic enough, I thought most of the actual vehicles what the robots turned into were actually pretty reasonable updates, though the cleaned up Bumblebee / Chevrolet looked strangely plastic. Again, some character designs and voices aside, there was that sense that this could be any generic giant robots fighting movie; Prime aside, I thought at first that Ratchet (for as much as he says in the movie) also sounded like the original, but it doesn’t seem to be the same voice actor.

What was most noteworthy about the racism was quite how blatant and how needless it was. Given a captive audience of people willing to go and see big screen Transformers, you’d think a savvy director would realise really how little you had to add to the basic equation. As it is, most of the things about the movie that annoyed felt like superfluous additions to the core idea of, well, giant transforming robots that fight each other that you remember from your childhood. Was it Jazz that kept going on at one point about shooting humans? That was another of those moments that were presumably intended as humorous and character defining and just ended up leaving you asking… why?

But that was expected maybe. I was surprised by how much I didn’t enjoy the elements I thought I would. Perhaps because of the speed of the camerawork, maybe not really feeling convinced by the “weight” of the robots, maybe just in terms of what they were actually doing, but the action scenes left me fairly bored. Haus mentioned how static some of the later scenes were, which I think contributed, as did the fairly mundane weaponry (where were the bullets coming from again?), and that most of the “high octane action” was unclear and over too quickly. So, rather than feel exhilarated coming out of the cinema, I felt deflated, having expected something nonsensical and badly structured that I could enjoy as pure spectacle, and then feeling that, well, it wasn’t that spectacular or impressive at all. By contrast, despite some occasionally iffy dialogue, I enjoyed what there was of the transformers bonding, even Prime’s (?) “My bad” raised a laugh. The scene where the Autobots hide out from the kid’s parents, relative to the rest of the film, seemed like comedy gold, and (to me) felt like one of the few moments where the film successfully addressed the size and weight of the robots in an amusing way. I was surprised that this was the tone where the movie seemed most comfortable, even charming, compared to where the direction would lurch in the final stages.

No-one’s really commented on this yet, but: I actually found the violence quite disturbing. So before everyone points and laughs because Blake Head faints at the sight of motor oil let me try to explain. Referenced elsewhere on the board, I think, is the spectacular ineffectiveness of some of the previous incarnations of the Autobots and Decepticons in actually destroying one another. So perhaps it’s a sentimental attachment to my childhood heroes in not wanting to see them hurt, but watching Jazz being killed at the end was quite unpleasant. It felt like a gratuitous moment where they could do a “cool” shot of a robot being torn apart with the payoff of establishing Megatron as a hardcore evil robot leader dude. Being honest, this maybe doesn’t work both ways, I was much less bothered by the (admittedly impressive) shot of Prime smashing up Bonecrusher’s face, though I suspect this was because it seemed like a more traditional struggle between two near equals than other fights in the film.

There were two more scenes with Bumblebee I found quite at odds with the general tone of light entertainment. The scene where he gets his legs blown off and comes crawling out of the wreckage seemed to cynically evoke a contemporary and very human image of suffering, with a weird overlay of it being ok because he’s a robot and they’d need to do more than that to stop him. And I thought that was a weird choice of image because it simultaneously portrays the sort of physical damage that one could expect from, say, a mine or a roadside bomb, in a film that, generally, with so much giant robotic weaponry floating about, unrealistically strives to avoid showing that sort of visceral injury happening to humans. Similarly, the earlier scene where Bumblebee mugs to the camera when he’s trussed up and about to be transported away by evil government types was again a moment when we (along with Sam) seemed to be being asked to have sympathy for a very familiar, genuine, human distress. And I suppose the argument is that we’re supposed to feel that Bumblebee is a sentient being capable of injury and pain, and that by showing that character in pain the filmmakers are highlighting the similarities between Autobots and humans, and the need for empathy between them. The problem being, I think, is that the level of characterisation was so slight, the humanity of the Autobots so incidental, that it seemed like a cheap, exploitative way of eliciting a false sympathy with needlessly distressing images of a character, that at least personally, I cared very little about.

There’s another scene near the end when Megatron appears booting some poor fleshy human across the ground, which was another weirdly dismissive, almost negligently unremarkable shot, not because Megatron shouldn’t be shown as having contempt for humans, but because in a film which I thought was very self-consciously not showing graphic violence against humans it was played almost for laughs, a throwaway, and again, there’s just no interest in the film for (if I recall correctly) the pilots of the fighter jets that Starscream destroys at the end. I mean, maybe it was just me, but I thought the film was quite interesting in the way that it used violence and whom that violence was inflicted upon.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:26 / 02.09.07
Well, Jazz - Autobot Jazz, for copyright reasons - had to die. He was a truisty and brave lieutenant to the leader of the good guys. with an African-American voice actor. He or Technical Sergeant Epps was not making it to the final reel.

The original thinking on Transformer guns went like this:

1) Transformers are, in general, pretty hard to kill. This was what always confused me about the death of Optimus Prime – surely they could just replace the damaged widget, hammer out a few dents and have him roadworthy again? All most peculiar. We have seen Transformers take hits from far bigger guns than Megatron's poncepistol and walk away.

2) With the exception of Optimus Prime, Autobots cannot fight for toffee.

3) With the exception of Megatron, neither can the Decepticons. The level of ordnance unleashed in a Transformer battle expressed as a ratio of the amount of actual structural damage done to the shapeshifting metal beasties themselves would make any quartermaster weep. Basically, they suck ass.

Except…clearly everyone had been putting in some work during the twenty years between our modern tales and Transformers: The Movie, as some of the shots were actually hitting their targets. The joy of practice. However, if I recall, not one Decepticon is really wiped out by the Autobot shelling – they are loaded into Astrotrain injured and dumped in space later.

All this leads us to only one possible timeline.

Somewhere between 1984 and 2004, intensive training allowed the Transformers on both sides to improve their accuracy to some level involving actually hitting each other once in a while. The fact that both achieve this bespeaks some sort of independent contractor.

Unfortunately, once their shots actually hit Transformer once in a while, they discovered that their guns were utterly ineffectual. Against oil tanks, towers, rock formations, futuristic buildings…all good. Against Transformers, utterly cack. Completely ineffectual. Embarrassed silence settles over the battleground as the warring factions realize that they may as well have spent the last three million years down the (no longer extant) pub.

However, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, superior Decepticon science (or, to put it another way, Soundwave. Soundwave rocked very hard. He had the coolest voice, and chicks dug him because he was a single parent) produces a gun that *actually* works on Autobots. Nice one. Autobots thus driven headlong from Cybertron, although reports from survivors of Decepticons using guns that did more than blister paint were largely dismissed; as confusion had turned to boredom and increasing ataraxy (look it the fuck up), and thence absolutely enormous drug abuse among the disenfranchised and deeply unengaged (both literally and figuratively) warriors. After all, what point was there in eternal vigilance when a surprise attack would at worst melt your wheels, if the enemy had a chance to play his weapon over your body for about half an hour before you turned around?

So, the element of surprise is still intact when the newly-functional Megatron attacks the Autobot shuttle. Which is why Prowl, Ironhide, Ratchet, Brawn et al go for the traditional tactic of running in to close with the enemy, since there really isn’t much else to do. Before crying, “Oi! Shit! That hurt! OK, time out! TIME OUT! Stop shooting at us!” and expiring in some consternation.

So, in conclusion, for a long time the Transformers were indeed unilaterally shit, but between 1984 and about 2001 they could have conquered the universe, had they only tried using their pathetically inadequate weaponry on literally any race other than the Transformers themselves. This, I fear, is one of the perversities of galactic history.


It seems we are back there here, really - you can shoot at a transformer for as long as you want, but the only effective way actually to take one out is to hit it with a sword or tear it in half. Shamingly, the humans are more effective at distance, as far as one can tell, than the Autobots.
 
 
Seth
00:49 / 03.09.07
You know... words are really all we've got, aren't they?
 
 
Dead Megatron
12:47 / 03.09.07
Was it Jazz that kept going on at one point about shooting humans?

No, that was Ironhide, but Jazz also sounded some distrust to humans.
 
 
Dead Megatron
15:27 / 27.09.07
Here we go again

This thread may very well go on forever
 
 
Dead Megatron
13:21 / 04.04.08
Devastator, the Gestalt is coming

I'm telling you, FOR EVAH!!!
 
 
Pyewacket The Elder
11:53 / 06.07.09
SPOILER: There is no rational critique in this post - please see my earlier post re: TF 1

Transformers is the greatest film evah!!!!!!!

Oh no - the other one:

Fucking terrible in every possible dimension known to the art of film making. One slightly good bit where Optimus gets canned inna forest. Kid in cinema cries NOOOOO. I get flash back to hiding my tears from my mum when optimus gets snuffed in the animated movie many years back "ahhh child if only thou knewest the optimus of my childhood - now there was an Autobot leader"....

Hate it hate it hate it hate it.

There is a transformers 2 line. Everyone on the other side justifies eugenics. Fuck you Michael Bay for destroying my libertarian sensibilities and for turning me into Hitler. I hate you more than if George Lucas bummed the corpse of my dead granny on live TV.

That is all.
 
 
iamus
00:01 / 07.07.09
I was not at all arsed to go see this until I read this review.

Now I think I might owe it to myself, just to see.
 
 
Pyewacket The Elder
06:24 / 07.07.09
Heavy spoilers and a funny analysis at all the total nonsense from this cinematic expulsion of effluent:

TOPLESS ROBOT
 
 
Dead Megatron
23:13 / 08.12.10

This thread shall never die
 
  

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