Transformers, 2007. Review #1.

"You've got the touch. You've got the POWER!!!" Oops, sorry, that was from the Eighties animated movie. So, if you haven't heard already, Transformers is out in theaters, and I saw it yesterday, so I thought I'd give it a review. I think there are spoilers ahead, so be prepared if you haven't seen it yet (But I only think three people in the entire United States hasn't seen it yet, because it grossed something insane like $156 million for it's first week. It broke Spidey's record. Crazy.)

Let me start by saying that I was a huge Transformers fan back in the day. Much like G.I.Joe, I watched the cartoon, I had a lot of the action figures and collected the comics (in fact, I'll probably review one on Wednesday). So I was pretty excited to see this movie, even though Michael Bay was the director, which was kind of a major turnoff.

Anyways, so I got to the theater about a half hour before the movie started and went to one of the kiosks to buy tickets, because only suckers wait in long lines to buy tickets. Well, I was almost a sucker because the first kiosk I tried didn't work and I was afraid that what happened on the Fourth when I tried to see FF2 was going to happen again. None of their kiosks were working and I didn't get to see the movie. Luckily, the second kiosk worked, and when I was flipping through the list of movies, I was going to go for the regular ten o'clock showing, but then noticed that they had a Digital Laser Projection (DLP) showing at ten thirty. Making the ten o'clock would have been a little tough, and since the DLP was the same mantinee price of six bucks, I decided to follow my own advice and went with the DLP.

So my advice is, if you've ever got the choice to see any of these superhero/action movies on a regular film projector or on a DLP, you've gotta go DLP. The image is sharper, the colors are brighter and because there are so many CGI effects in these kinds of movies, they show up much cleaner on a digital projector. Transformers is no exception. Bumblebee was super bright yellow, even when he was robot form and Optimus was actually pretty cool with the flame paintjob that he had going on. There's also a pretty cool part involving Optimus that I don't want to give away. But that scene was pretty rad with the DLP and I highly suggest it if you know you've got one in your area.

So, moving on to the actual movie. It was ok, not super great, but not super bad either even though it was a little long at two and a half hours. Some stuff could have been cut out and I wouldn't have cared that much. A lot of the comic relief seemed forced and probably could have been cut down or cut out.

Acting: Personally, I find Shia LaBeouf really annoying, but he was tolerable in this movie. This next observation is pretty obvious, I probably don't even have to bring it up, but Megan Fox and Rachael Taylor are superhot. I understand Megan Fox's character, she's from the wrong side of the tracks, blah, blah, blah, but Rachael Taylor's character is kind of hilarious because she works for the government as a highlevel codecracker. I'm not trying to be sexist here, but there is a scene where the camera pans around a room full of super codecracking nerds and then it stops on her, and she's smokin' hot with an Australian accent. Right. And it turns out that she can't even crack the code, that's why Anthony Anderson is in the movie. But she was still smokin' hot.

The Plot: So the effects were great. I mean it's a Michael Bay movie, so you're really not expecting an intellectual, plot-driven, mind-expanding movie. Effects are his bread and butter, and he's good at it. Basically, you want to see Robots beating the crap out of each other, and that's what they do. I do have one gripe though. There was one scene where they're at Hoover Dam and they say they're going to go to a city twenty miles away to extract Shia LaBeouf's character. Why they couldn't do that somewhere in the desert to cut down on the collateral damage is beyond me. Oh, that's right, there aren't any radios in this movie that work, so they had to use some shortwave radios and they had to get them in the city. Yeah, lame plotline. Anyways, they get to the city and it's downtown L.A. Now, it was pretty well publicized that it was filmed downtown, but they could have at least made an effort to downplay it in the movie. At one point, they prominently showed a Wilshire street sign. Alls I'm sayin' is that they could have made an effort here. And the ending left out a whole group of characters, I guess they survived, but you really don't know because they did show them at the end. And of course they set it up for a sequel.

So, overall, it was good, but I probably won't be buying it on DVD, so there you go. It's a superbargin as a matinee, so go out and see it when you get the chance. I think Rich is working up a review that he'll post tomorrow and from what I've read it's pretty good and hits on a couple of points that I didn't bring up.