just got back from seeing it..
holy crap...
there were a few things i didn't like- the overly complex transformations and the "bullet time" thing they did from time to time- but overall, i thought it was a good movie.
a few of the voices were familiar- Optimus, Megatron and (i think) Starscream. some of the others might have been, as well, but i haven't seen one of the old shows for a while.
it had everything- a love story, idiotic top secret government agents, and robots tearing stuff up. they even threw in a few references to movies like Armageddon (one guy said how silly that movie was), and Bumblebee opened his doorto damage a yellow old style VW Beetle at the used car lot. even some dialog between Megatron and Optimus was taken directly from the old movie- word for word.
who could ask for more?
and we all now know what the true purpose of the Hoover dam is, and that there will be a sequel....

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The guy who did the original Starscream, Chris Latta, is dead, this one is voiced by Charlie Adler.

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Thanks, that's all I needed to hear. I'll see it next week.

my biggest complaint was that Michael Bay thought that Optimus need a mouth for some reason. i always thought he was kind of cool with just a shield over where his mouth was. well, he had the mouth shield in the movie- but it moved in by itself right before he took on Megatron, so it was just more uselss mechanical CGI wizardry.

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I thought is was good. I am starting to dislike Michael 'lets kill as many innocent bystanders as possible' Bey's directing style tho. Actually, I am starting to seriously dislike the current 'too much action to actually tell what is going on' style in general.

There were a couple rather stupid things, quite a few cliches, and waaaaaaay too much technobabble, but it was stll a decent movie.

a touch of spoiler here:





I liked that human weapons actually could hurt the transformers. I always annoys me when the aliens are completely immune to anything human, no matter what. Human stuff dosent have to do much, but it should do something.

OK, so the big question for me is, did it give anyone here headaches? I stopped watching Bay after Armageddon because his movies gave me headaches. It doesn't come out here for three weeks, so I need to know whether I should avoid it on health grounds.

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I saw it , it didn't gave me one.

I enjoyed watching it.

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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein

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This movie made me very sad. Very, very sad.

First, let me say, that for a movie called Transformers there's precious little actual Transformer action in the movie. The movie not once actually focuses on the robots as characters. Hell, the majority of lines given to the Transformers were ripped, kicking and screaming, out of the original Transformers cartoon movie from the 1980s.

I had very, very low expectations for this movie, but on some level I still expected it to be about giant alien robots fighting each other. Just about all of the movie reviews recap it as such. Some even talk about how long the robot fighting goes on, almost a straight hour claimed at least one reviewer. I counted about 10 minutes, and it was used as backdrop as the camera focused on some wiener kid sprinting through an abandoned sky rise that looked more like a warehouse.

The original cartoon was terrible. When I went back to watch it a few years ago, it made me wonder what kind of junk I was watching as a kid, and how I could have ever come up with happy memories of it all. But at least when it promised giant transforming space robots locked in an interstellar war, it delivered. This just felt like a typical Bay I LUV TEH US ARMY movie that, somewhere along the lines, had some transforming robots inserted in as gently as a rivet gets inserted into a cow's head.

I knew the movie was going to be bad. I had such low expectations of it. I knew there was going to be a lot of focus on the military. I even knew that my childhood emotions and memories were being exploited months in advance of the movie coming out. I was just expecting a 2 hour advertisement for Hasbro toys and video games, not a 2.5 hour commercial for GMC.

I mean, most of the Decepticons didn't even have a speaking role. We're just told to hate them in the same way we're told to hate Darth Maul: They're called Decepticons, therefore they're trying to destroy us.

Hey, even if the main story line was about the military trying to fight off the evil space robots and having marginal success, I'd probably be OK with that. But, to rip a phrase from a Rotten Tomatoes review, this movie was Herbie: Fully Loaded with some fighting on the side. The "star" of the movie is just an overly whiny, sweaty teenage boy who, in the process of trying to woo a girl way out of his league, happens to save the universe.

Let me tell you, I got stuck watching Herbie: Fully Loaded on an 8 hour bus ride between Edmonton and Regina last year. I didn't need that trauma to be brought up again.

All-in-all, I thought the movie stunk even without it "leaking lubricant" all over my childhood. But it did urinate all over my memories, and for that I'm doubly ticked off.

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Wow, pretty harsh review. I've seen it twice, and I didn't see any of the things you mentioned.

Huh, precious little transformation? In my mind I just counted 13 different transformations in the first half of the movie (yeah I'm a geek, oh well), and there's probably that many if not more in just the final battle of the movie.

I believe it's far fetched to say that the "Majority" of the lines given to the Transformers were "ripped, kicking and screaming", from the cartoon movie. I know of only one line "One shall stand, one shall fall." That's the only one I know of. And, for the amount of dialog the Transformers had in the trailers and TV spots, I was surprised to see just how much dialog they actually had in the movie.

I get the feeling that your low expectations influenced most of your experience. There is "robots fighting each other" in the movie, it's all a matter of how much you expect. While I agree that it's not a straight hour, I also think that your 10 minutes isn't correct either. You also make it sound as if ROBOT vs ROBOT is all the action in the film which to me the action seemed to take off from the start and not end until two and a half hours later.

Which, again, makes me think you were determined from the start to hate the movie, and thus you looked for every reason to.

I don't think this movie didn't either, I think you may have been expecting too much.

Again, it's just seems you were determined from the start.

Yeah, I wish commercials were as interesting as this movie.

No, "we" hate them because they are trying to destroy "us". Actions speak as loud as words. How are we suppose to interpret a robot helicopter destroying a military base, or an self driven car threatening to run over someone cowering in front of it, or a radio shooting razor sharp CD's at people, the list goes on and on.

It doesn't sound like your childhood memories of the franchise were that good to begin with.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put you down, I'm just rebutting your review of the movie. I do believe that most of your opinions where predetermined before you even watched it, but maybe it's just me.

Everyone's going to have a different opinion of the movie. I don't like most all of Michael Bays' other films, but I think that most people here would enjoy Transformers. If you forget for 2.5 hours that it's directed my Michael Bay, and that yeah, it's got some cliches and typecasts, it's still a fun film to just sit there and get lost in for a couple hours. The action is great, the transformations are awesome. I got chills watching Barricade running after Bubble bee, jump, transform in mid air, land speeding off in chase. Yeah, that's the geek in me too.

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I thought I was going to hate, hate, hate the movie, but aside from the typical Michael Bay editing of the movie as if it were a music video, the melodramatic musical score (which sounded just like it came out of Armageddon), the sappy romantic subplot and assorted other Michael Bay-isms, I enjoyed the film for what it was: a popcorn movie not meant to be taken seriously.

As for car product placement in the film, other than Bumblebee being a fictional car (which would kind of defeat the purpose in blending in), how could this criticism be avoided?

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When I saw that movie, It was like, action from the start, and you get hooked watching it, this is because my son didn't sleep in this movie and is awake from the start to end. Anyway, it is indeed 2 and 1/2 hrs that fly so fast I didn't remember myself looking at my watch until the movie was finished.

One cliche I like [yeah its the girl in me] is when the girl decided to walk and leave her hunkie bf , the boy has a crush on her , and his car(bumbleblee) played the song "Who's gonna drive you home?" and followed the girl and offer her a ride.

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Jean
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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein

"The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge " - Bertrand Russell

I loved it. Yes, the characters were threadbare and stereotypical, and the movie had plot holes a mile wide, but for me the movie was kind of like junk food: empty, but terribly satisfying calories.

For me, a childhood Transformers fan, it was enjoyable, escapist nostalgia.

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He's a new Chevrolet Camaro. The concept was designed in 2006 and will be sold beginning with the 2008 or 2009 model year.

The way to avoid it would be to use a wider variety of manufacturers' vehicles. They wanted to keep Bumblebee a Beetle, for example, but VW refused to have its products associated with violence, so the movie makers didn't have permission to use VW vehicles. (I just don't know why they didn't go with something smaller and more buglike, like an Aveo or Cobalt... but then I don't know why Ratchet isn't a more practical model of ambulance or why Ironhide is a black pickup truck instead of a red van. Why do that and still keep the names?) I think I might have heard of Ford refusing permission for similar reasons to VW. Certainly, even if others gave permission, the more companies whose stuff you use, the more companies you have to pay to use their stuff, and that increases costs.

Not that it really counts as a commercial anyway, since people in general don't look at cars and immediately automaticly know what company made them, and the company name and slogans weren't being used...

this movie was the back story- the setup for the next one.
i'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the next one will have a resurrected Megatron looking to kick some butt, and a whiny, cowardly, back stabbing Starscream doing whatever he can to take control from Megatron.
it will be glorious.

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I'm not sure I agree with something in Phil's review:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movi...nsformers.html
Think of this as an example - Optimus Prime is a rather large semi truck, I'm not sure of the exact weight, but don't they weight several thousands of tons?

Now you take that, and stand it up, now you have the entire weight of a semi truck concentrated into the area of the robot's two feet, not spread out among the tires and suspension of the truck. It seems pretty plausible that when the robot walks the ground would shake and it would leave craters.

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Thousands of tons?

Not quite - a standard semi is limited to 80,000 pounds gross weight. So other than the "oversize load" trucks, the peak is around 40 tons. That's still a lot though...

No land vehicle weighs thousands of tons. Cars weigh about 1.2-1.9 tons and the bigger, heavier pickup trucks can be more like 3 tons apiece unloaded, and Optimus Prime's kind of truck can't be very many times as big as them. Skimming through some manufacturer websites, I'm seeing cab/tractor weights all the way from 5 to 10 tons at the extreme, but more typically from 6 to 7.

An F-22 weighs 31,700 pounds (15.85 tons) empty but can carry enough fuel and weapons to add up to 80,000 pounds (40 tons) at take-off.

That much weight on two walking feet or falling from a substantial height could cause shaking for some distance away. But I don't think "craters" have been seen where such cars & trucks have fallen off of bridges/cliffs, and I haven't even heard of it from fighter plane crashes.

I thought the movie was OK... entertaining but not ultimately awesome. Which is about what I was expecting.

The plot had some cavernous holes, the autobots had far too much screentime and dialogue (I wanted to see more of the decepticons, who were much cooler by far as usual), and the film was by and large fairly incoherent and didn't actually get started IMO til they left the dam.

Though there were some crazy examples of human insanity in it, like hiding the "iceman" under a dam (which I'm surprised didn't get blown up), and deciding to go to the city (where thousands of innocent bystanders can be killed or injured) to have a fight. What the heck?!

they didn't go to the city to "have a fight", they went there to try to hide the Allspark from the Decepticons and try to buy some time to get it out of the area.

doesn't anyone ever listen to dialog any more?

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All the reliable electrical power you could ever ask for to keep him cold. Also, it would take a *bleeping* lot to blow up Hoover Dam. A tactical nuclear bomb with a direct hit could probably do it.

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The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Oh pshaw, I thought Megatron took a good chunk out of one in one of the early issues of the comic (at least, I remember a scene where there was a big fight over a dam and I'm fairly sure the dam got damaged at least).

Was that supposed to be Hoover Dam in the film? It did kinda look like it.

You're missing the point. If you've got a bunch of very destructive giant robots chasing after something you have, then the very last place you should be leading them to is a densely populated city.

(course I have to wonder how they thought they could get it out of there anyway, given that the Decepticons could and did shoot the extraction helicopters down)

You could probably take out something like Hoover Dam with a few nice heavy bombs sunk behind it on the water side of the dam...

If you drop them into the water, and then blow them up near the dam a hundred feet underwater or so, the water could help transmit the shockwave, and at very least damage it. It would take a lot, but I would bet that a few tons of standard explosives could do it if done right.

(It would have to be pretty precise though - not just dropping bombs all over the place and hoping to hit)

Saw it on Friday, I liked a LOT more than I disliked.

I gave the transformers themselves about three seconds apiece to convince me the translation from cartoon to live action was done right. The Autobots passed with flying colors, the echoes of their Gen1 personalities were perfect. New vehicle types were a given, so complaints there seem a little childish in retrospect, though Bumblebee's 10 second makeover halfway through was pretty sweet.

The Decepticons were almost unrecognizable, even the familiar Starscream was lacking in anything of his original personality. Megatron's new form was fine, totally understandable from a physics standpoint, through Hasbro can kiss my lily white posterior about their anti-gun crap.

On the downside, they didn't pick many mainstream Decepticons. On the upside, they didn't pick many mainstream Decepticons. Aside from Megatron and Soundwave, the next three core Decepticons were virtual clones of one another (Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp). The secondstringers they put in the movie were reasonable choices, though they kinda blurred the old ground/air line that was a key plot point from the original series.

The caricature nature of the US government as presented was not unexpected, though I think the MiB stand ins were annoying.

One thing that carried through from the original movie, aside from virtually every line in Megatron's and Prime's duel, was the lack of fear of a robotic body count. No reset buttons here, they break, they hurt, and they die.

The bottom line, though, I got what I was looking for. A reasonably competent translation of a 20 year old cartoon into a modern live action movie.

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Oops - I meant to type "thousands of pounds."

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well ,the first time he saw Megatron- what did he do? he bowed down and stated how he gives all his loyalty to Megatron- and only THEN telling him that the humans and Autobots have gotten away with the Allspark. good news first, then bad news.. sounds like Starscream to me.
i'll bet the next movie will have a lot more of the old school Megatron/Starscream dynamic- Megatron is dead (hope that wasn't a spoiler..), and that would leave him in charge. who wants to bet me that Megatron gets resurrected in the next one, and takes his leadership role back from Starscream- much like in the cartoon movie when he gets resurrected as Galvatron and takes Starscream out with one shot?

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I got to see it here. entertaining but there was a lot I might have changed.


what was the point of the Australian girl and her friend? They added nothing to the plot.

And yes, I would have liked to see some more far away scenes to actually watch the fighting - close up fighting moves too fast and it's hard to see any action at all.

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Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

Supposedly a sequel is already in the works, which is one of the key reasons Soundwave was sidelined.

Personally, I like my idea. Shoot Micheal Bay in the mouth and hire Sam Raimi.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I found the score to be quite boring. I couldn't put my finger on how bad, but when you say Armageddon I agree.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

<<Personally, I like my idea. Shoot Micheal Bay in the mouth and hire Sam Raimi.>>

That's what I'm talking about...

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