Transformers

Being a lifelong Transformers fan, I was very pleased to be able to see it here on opening night at my favorite local theater, Hoyt's Regal Cinema by BCC, with my step-brother Kevin and Danny (both also fans of the license).

The theater had a huge line (unusual for around here) but we still managed to get good seats. The audience was made up of fans who laughed and applauded at all the right parts. What Bay always gets right, even if it's cheesy: making heroes out of military folks (all those slow-mo shots of people climbing into jets, responding to attacks), and the simplest tugging of heart-strings (the tooth fairy gag).

When I first saw the new art direction on the robots I didn't like it (prefer the blockier original designs, or the ones from the War Within series), but hoped seeing it in action would somehow help. Unfortunately it didn't: all the little parts and pieces, especially the slender bits added to the faces to help them seem expressive, made it difficult for me to focus on anything in closeups - they were just too busy. Plus it seemed like all that stuff would fly off at the first punch!

On that note I thought the fight choreography was impressive and beautifully done, but sometimes difficult to follow (again because of the complexity of the robot designs). I also found the fights very similar to Spidey3: I guess there are only so many ways to have super-heroes trash an urban environment (throwing each other through buildings, etc.)

The story unfortunately boiled down what was already a fairly cheesy back-story and made it lamer: the core McGuffin of the movie is something that supposedly explains their origins (and our technology since 1930-something) but somehow only makes evil robots out of ordinary machines. How are the Autobots altruistic then?

All that aside I think I was most disturbed by the visual at the end: the geeky guy gets the hot girl (so far so good), they're making out as the sun sets over the California hills (nice!) as they lay on the hood of his car, which is a sentient being (some weird threesome?) Even worse, as the camera pulls back more you see the rest of the Autobot gang standing around apparently watching the make-out session. Nice visual setup for a commercial, but kinda creepy when you think it through.

Still, despite all those things I enjoyed getting out and seeing a movie on opening night, and it was a fun "summer" movie (lots of explosions, mind-blowing effects, etc.) Thanks again to Kevin & Danny for meeting me, let's do it again soon!