Wandering Idiot wrote:
Just saw it today. I'll be damned, it actually wasn't bad. I thought people were just under some collective delusion from seeing their childhood heroes onscreen. The pacing was quite good, with enough action, subplots, and funny moments to keep the human-centric scenes from dragging like I was afraid they would. Needed more Optimus vs. Megatron, though- we barely got to see them fight, except when it cut to Megatron throwing Optimus into something.
Other nitpicks:
* What was up with the fights scenes in general? This isn't like Batman Begins, where they had to use close-ups and quick editing to hide the inadequacies of the stuntman having to move in the suit; the robots looked pretty good whenever we saw them in wide shots, so wtf Michael Bay? He should have done a 300 and had the fights take place almost entirely in slo-mo. I know it's his style, but think of the poor programmer who had to create a robot with 67,000,000 moving parts just to have Bay stick the virtual camera inside its colon.
I hope he reads this and puts this advice into the sequel.
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* Why didn't Ironhide have his southern accent? Given Jazz's ridiculously stereotypical voice, it would have fit right in, and made the character that much more awesome, although his rocket-jumping and tag-teaming with that other bot (the medic, I think) made me want to have his robo-babies anyway. Making them horrifying cyborg robo-manbabies, I suppose.
they got their voices/language skills from the World Wide Web. the south doesnt have access yet.
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* Needed a little more time with the Autobots in general. I know they were expensive to put on screen, but we needed at least one more character moment for most of them, especially if the movie's going to do things like expect us to remember who Jazz is at the end.
Um... that's it, really. There are a vast number of other arguments against it of course, but they're mostly along the lines of the absence of things like plot logic, well developed characters, realism, etc., that the movie had no pretension of trying to include in the first place, and so would be kind of pointless.
For making a mindless fluff summer movie which was entertaining enough to keep me from waking up my brain during it and ruining the experience, and for doing about as good a job as could ever be expected when the primary source material is a toy line, I give it 4 exploding robotic thumbs out of 5.
I enjoyed it, too. I marked out when Optimus started to speak. Peter cullen voices two of my favorite childhood characters (Optimus and Eeyore), so he was the perfect choice for it.
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P.S.- Did anyone else laugh at completely different moments than most of the audience? I just groaned when Bumblebee "lubricated" on the MiB, but laughed out loud during the great little moment when the main character is explaining Megatron to the bigwigs and sounds exactly like some kid trying to explain his toys to his parents. Also hilarious was the same character shouting about how his dad was the head of the neighborhood watch to the police on the phone; as someone who deals with the public, I know people will pull precisely that same type of shit all the time ("I don't care if you're a lawyer/reporter/own a company/play golf with Verizon's president/a friend of the Secretary of State's third cousin's 5th-grade teacher/etc., we can't get a technician out until tomorrow, sir, seeing at it's 9 at night...")
I cracked up because it reminded me of David Gest whining about when Liza Minelli would beat him. the whole conversation would be
Odd lines: She hit me like this and that and did this and that to me
Even lines: how could she? I know (insert some famous name here, the willy nelson one cracked me up the most)
All in all. I got to enjoy this movie with my kids. A parental dream come true.
John
Blue Sun Missile
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