Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Review - Transformers
Funny thing this movie is...
I first saw it at Frogner kino (cinema)for free since it was work-related and I left feeling pissed off that someone could produce such a high polished piece of turd. The characters, story, design, editing, music, dialogue where down right bad! The characters where straight out of the cliche-book. With the main character Sam basicly being a horny teenager caught in the middle of it all with the uber hot girl with a "bad" rep and the over-the-top John Turturro as sector 7`s head honcho. The personalites of the robots came out of the blue for me and where more a comic relif then dangerous metal killerbots.(funky breakdancing robot?) I guess the bots had to have "feelings and opinions" so that we can relate to them as characters, not just wired junk metal on stereoids bashing each others hardware out. I should have seen it comming with the second robot character we meet was extremly innoing and reminded me of something they ditched in Star wars, episodes 1-3. I havent watched the "old" show so I dident know they where going to be so personal and charismatic. Music was another issue. The classical score worked while some of the pop songs feelt like it was trying to hard to be modern and for the kiddies. Hearing Linking park 30 times in the movie is too much for anyone..
Even some of the effects werent on par. It might have something to do with the fact that to many bits and pieces moved at the same time. Apparently it took approximately 38 hours for the animators at Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. I mean, is it really necessary to have motion on more pices then the human-eye can register? It would be a lot cooler if there where like big chunks of gears and metalbits that made sense when it was re-arranging and in general motion. I guess that would just have taken to much time to assemble so they insted went with the "porridge" solution. So imagine 10108 moving bits and pices on Prime for a 5 second transformation clip and throw in motion blur and zoom. It was just messy.
The next day I watched it at Coloseum cinema with 8-9 friends of mine. Most of them where there to gaze upon the spectacular effects. We sit down after providing some much needed soda and popcorn. I look around myself. Mostly guys in 25-35 age. 2% female apperance. The movie starts. Optimus Prime speaks his opening monologe. What the deuce? People are cheering. Must be some really die hard fans I guess. The logo "TRANSFORMERS" appers and people start to clap and cheer some more. Even stading up yelling.. Did I miss the free designer drug at the entrance? The movie continues. The hint of story I allready know so I got real comfy in the chair, keeping a eye out for details and goofs thinking: poor suckers, dont know whats going to hit them. Halfway through the movie, Im smiling. Im actully enjoying this. The characters now sort of make sense and the dialog has a much better flow. The effects fucking rocks! Transformation are flawless and the integration between live actors and cg was perfect at times. Even the design of the bots has finally embedded it self in my scull and Optimus never looked so good. The movie ends to linking park and people are giving it a standing ovation! Hussa!
There are still some dialog that are completely out of order and feel really tacked on. And some advertising screentime such as the "mountain dew dispenser machine" and 360 bot really feels like a quick sponsor deal. Also the shere size of the robots amounted to extremely little destruction. Blackout (the chopper in the beginning) deals out more destruction in 5 min then all of the robots at the end.w00t?! There is a 15 minute fight in the street downtown that (despite some massive set piece destruction by Megatron chasing Sam and fighting Prime) all looks like its happening in the same street. + Its rated PG-13 so there is a lack of people dieing. I know that its not the Transformers way of doing stuff but I mean, when your taking the one thing that all the bots want downtown, your kinda asking for it.
For what the original tvshow was, Bay has done a tremendous job of bringing it to the silver screen. I mean this is what he had to go from: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fB0_vJUc3o4 (maybe not the best example but you get the picture..) They should have spendt more time on building up the robot-characters but this beeing a franchise the next movie is propably allready in early production
Here is a review that I can relate most with:
http://movies.ign.com/articles/800/800501p1.html
from IGN - June 29, 2007 -
I first saw it at Frogner kino (cinema)for free since it was work-related and I left feeling pissed off that someone could produce such a high polished piece of turd. The characters, story, design, editing, music, dialogue where down right bad! The characters where straight out of the cliche-book. With the main character Sam basicly being a horny teenager caught in the middle of it all with the uber hot girl with a "bad" rep and the over-the-top John Turturro as sector 7`s head honcho. The personalites of the robots came out of the blue for me and where more a comic relif then dangerous metal killerbots.(funky breakdancing robot?) I guess the bots had to have "feelings and opinions" so that we can relate to them as characters, not just wired junk metal on stereoids bashing each others hardware out. I should have seen it comming with the second robot character we meet was extremly innoing and reminded me of something they ditched in Star wars, episodes 1-3. I havent watched the "old" show so I dident know they where going to be so personal and charismatic. Music was another issue. The classical score worked while some of the pop songs feelt like it was trying to hard to be modern and for the kiddies. Hearing Linking park 30 times in the movie is too much for anyone..
Even some of the effects werent on par. It might have something to do with the fact that to many bits and pieces moved at the same time. Apparently it took approximately 38 hours for the animators at Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. I mean, is it really necessary to have motion on more pices then the human-eye can register? It would be a lot cooler if there where like big chunks of gears and metalbits that made sense when it was re-arranging and in general motion. I guess that would just have taken to much time to assemble so they insted went with the "porridge" solution. So imagine 10108 moving bits and pices on Prime for a 5 second transformation clip and throw in motion blur and zoom. It was just messy.
The next day I watched it at Coloseum cinema with 8-9 friends of mine. Most of them where there to gaze upon the spectacular effects. We sit down after providing some much needed soda and popcorn. I look around myself. Mostly guys in 25-35 age. 2% female apperance. The movie starts. Optimus Prime speaks his opening monologe. What the deuce? People are cheering. Must be some really die hard fans I guess. The logo "TRANSFORMERS" appers and people start to clap and cheer some more. Even stading up yelling.. Did I miss the free designer drug at the entrance? The movie continues. The hint of story I allready know so I got real comfy in the chair, keeping a eye out for details and goofs thinking: poor suckers, dont know whats going to hit them. Halfway through the movie, Im smiling. Im actully enjoying this. The characters now sort of make sense and the dialog has a much better flow. The effects fucking rocks! Transformation are flawless and the integration between live actors and cg was perfect at times. Even the design of the bots has finally embedded it self in my scull and Optimus never looked so good. The movie ends to linking park and people are giving it a standing ovation! Hussa!
There are still some dialog that are completely out of order and feel really tacked on. And some advertising screentime such as the "mountain dew dispenser machine" and 360 bot really feels like a quick sponsor deal. Also the shere size of the robots amounted to extremely little destruction. Blackout (the chopper in the beginning) deals out more destruction in 5 min then all of the robots at the end.w00t?! There is a 15 minute fight in the street downtown that (despite some massive set piece destruction by Megatron chasing Sam and fighting Prime) all looks like its happening in the same street. + Its rated PG-13 so there is a lack of people dieing. I know that its not the Transformers way of doing stuff but I mean, when your taking the one thing that all the bots want downtown, your kinda asking for it.
For what the original tvshow was, Bay has done a tremendous job of bringing it to the silver screen. I mean this is what he had to go from: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fB0_vJUc3o4 (maybe not the best example but you get the picture..) They should have spendt more time on building up the robot-characters but this beeing a franchise the next movie is propably allready in early production
Here is a review that I can relate most with:
http://movies.ign.com/articles/800/800501p1.html
from IGN - June 29, 2007 -
Labels: movie review
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