Rating of
3/4
Autobots, transform and product place!
Jonzor - wrote on 11/06/07
I really liked this movie. I did. Probably more than most movies I'd give 3 stars too. It's just that I REALLY liked the parts I liked and the parts that I didn't like struck me as serious flaws.
What did I like about this movie? Gosh, I wonder. Giant robots that transform into cars and tanks and stuff that fight each other... how can you go wrong? The effects were amazing, and getting the original voice for Optimus Prime (possibly one of the coolest hero characters ever) was a great bit of nostalgia.
Shia LaBeouf knocked his role out of the park, despite the fact that the writers got a little carried away with the "look, he's an awkward teenager" bits. Life as a 16-year-old is awkward, we get it, I don't need it beaten into me.
So... what DIDN'T I like? The title characters took a bit of a backseat, honestly. This felt a lot like a movie FEATURING the super-rad, transforming, giant, awesome robots that the movie is named for than a movie ABOUT the super-rad, transforming... sweet... whatever. You get the idea.
Case in point: the first robot-on-robot fighting. Bumblebee vs. Barricade. FINALLY! This is why I came to see this movie! I want to see these guys shoot and punch each other! Can anyone tell me how that fight ended? NOPE. You spend the whole time ASSUMING that they're fighting while you watch the humans fight off Spaz with some power tools. They get done with him and... oh! Look! There's Bumblebee! I guess he won the fight... too bad we didn't get to see hardly any of it. It's a good thing no one came to this movie to watch some giant robots fight, 'cause you'll have to wait till nearly the END of the movie to get any of that, now.
Another thing that drove me nuts was the blond, British, hacker chick. That WHOLE storyline was almost completely irrelevant. I mean, if we needed to see the behind-the-scenes government action... they could have just shown it... we didn't need that nonsense about signals and playing DDR and donuts. Totally uneeded.
Finally, my last beef with the movie is... can you name the guy who did the voice of Megatron? Believe it or not, it was Hugo Weaving. I ask you, what's the point of having someone like that, who has a great voice, do voice work for your movie if you're going to disguise it so much that it's unrecognizable?
I'm at a crossroads about whehter or not I like this movie a LOT or just like it. I think that if it had just been a movie, it would have been GREAT. But the thing is, I wanted SO MUCH MORE of the actual robots I'd paid to see and SO MUCH LESS of the humans I've seen in countless other movies over the years.
Essentially, what I'm saying about this movie is that the giant fighting robots were exactly as awesome as they needed to be... I just wished they had actually gotten the lead in the movie.
