Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Megan Fox, Peter Cullen, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Rachael Taylor, John Turturro, Jon Voight, Hugo Weaving
Tagline: "Their war. Our world."
Random Trivia: The voice of Orson Welles from War of the Worlds is heard via Bumblebee's radio. Welles final role recorded was the voice of the planet-eating Unicron in the 1986 Transformers animated movie. In police car mode, Barricade has "To punish and enslave" printed on him. Megan Fox *drools*...
If you watch no other movie with a hot chick bending over the hood of a car, at least watch this one!
Yeah, we know what you're thinking Shia!
Welcome to my Transformers review. I've been a bit behind, this being the first time I've smoked in a while. But I'm in a good mood tonight, the highest I've been for weeks, and I thought with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen due, I'd get to a Transformers review. Like how we reviewed the three Terminator movies as Terminator: Salvation came out. Did I say three??? Well... pot will do that to you.
I'm also going on a Michael Bay kick and will have a couple more of his explosion-laden flicks on the way. In the meantime:
Transformers, a fucking Hasbro toy. One of the coolest toys ever I might add. A cool cartoon to go with it, and the greatest casting move ever in the animated movie from the 80s - Orson Welles as the planet-destroying Unicron. For a simple toy, that's quite the heritage, and a live-action movie, when announced, sounded like a studio cash grab - a horrid idea. How the hell could any movie live up to the various cartoon series and toy lines?
Going back to development, there were cries of "this will rape my childhood." The only bright spot was that Steven Spielberg was producing. Then we got word the Michael "Lets Blow Shit Up Real Good" Bay was directing. And it was back to "oh fuck" for the fans. Honestly, I like the Bad Boys movies, but Pearl Harbor? There's a special place in my heart for The Rock as well, but then you have Armageddon, which to me was a colossal waste of a movie.
Hmm. A legend as a producer. An iffy director, but one who can handle action and explosions. This really could have gone either way.
So in my fine tradition of boiling reviews down to a single sentence: Transformers did not rape my childhood.
The story is all over. It opens with a Decepticon (read: giant evil robots from another world who take the shape of machines to disguise themselves) attack on an army base in the middle east. They're looking for info that apparently the U.S. government has about the Allspark - the source of life on their home world, Cybertron. Also seeking the spark, and sticking up for otherwise squashible humans, are the Autobots (read: the good guys). Fuck it I don't need to do much background, you know the toys/cartoon. Optimus Prime leads the Autobots. Josh Duhamel leads a group of the surviving soldiers as they try to make it the fuck out of the desert alive. Shia LaBeouf leads one of the luckiest lives around given he gets to stare at Megan Fox a whole lot.
Yes, people do get killed in this. No blood though kids - remember, it's PG-13, so things like blood can't be shown. And we wonder why kids today don't value life...
Meanwhile, Shia Le Poof is a kid who winds up with one of the Autobots for a car - a gift from dad for getting good grades. The late Bernie Mac plays the seedy used car dealer who offloads the camero-shaped Bumblebee (he was a VW Beetle in the cartoon), and we have our first WTF moment of the night. Because it's fucked that I'm referring to Bernie Mac in the past-tense.
Megan Fox is... uhhh... Megan Fox... ummm... ahh fuck it. She's the hottest piece of eye candy out there right now. I have no idea what her performance in this movie was like - I think it was decent. I was lost in my thoughts most of the time she was on-screen. She's the love interest for Shia's Sam Witwicky, the geeky kid who gets the girl. See, not only is his car a Transformer, as he soon learns, he's also a descendant of the man who first discovered the Transformers on earth, a century earlier when Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving), evil leader of the evil Decepticons, evily crashed in the evil North Pole. Evil.
Having fun yet?
Shia has his ancestor's eye glasses, upon which the location of the Allspark can be found.
There's a fuckload of subplots going on. Rachael Taylor plays an NSA team member who discovers the transmission/code the Decepticons are using to steal top secret data. There's something with the wife of Josh Duhamel's Captain Lennox that looks as if it was left entirely on
the cutting room floor. Jon Voight is the secretary of defense and is given some of the worst lines in a film not exactly teeming with stellar dialogue to begin with - although he delivers them as solidly as he can. John Turturro plays a seriously weird agent of Sector 7, a so-top-secret-even-the-government-doesn't-know-about-it government agency created under the Hoover administration to deal with the discovery of Megatron and the Allspark way back then.
We're going to do a G, B, and U breakdown from here:
The Good: The "transform" noise. Brings back memories. Peter Cullen returns to voice Optimus Prime. The effects are awesome, especially the transformations. The opening scene is strong, and sets the tone for the action sequences throughout. Lennox's wife making a "girls don't fart" reference, just because that's a personal gripe of mine. The robotic sounds over the studio logos gets you in the mood for a giant robot action flick.
The transform sound is actually soothing. Megan Fox. Sam's mother telling Sector 7 agents to get their hands "off her bush." The fact that the Autobots learned Earth's languages via the world wide web - oh fuck, look out for the lolspeak/l337speak, ppl!
The action overall. Megan Fox's ass. Seeing Optimus Prime for the first time. I still have that toy somewhere, and it was the coolest toy ever. Seriously, every kid wanted an Optimus Prime growing up.
The Bad: Hugo Weaving replacing the original voice of Megatron. Nothing against Mr. Weaving - he's awesome in The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and I'm thrilled to hear he'll be in The Hobbit - but they brought back Peter Cullen for Optimus, and they really should have stuck with the rest of the original voice case as much as possible as well.
Megatron really doesn't resemble his cartoon alter-ego much.
The Allspark just reminds me of Energon cubes. If you know the cartoon, you know they're always looking for energon cubes. Multiple series have been built on this idea. Fuck. Find an alternative fuel source already!
Why is it always Earth that aliens come across in their intergalactic battles? I want to see a movie where we stumble across an alien world and COMPLETELY FUCK WITH THEM.
The Ugly: Too many subplots. Hopefully they pare down the number of human characters in the next one and keep it simple. Rachael Taylor's entire performance could have been dropped from this and you'd wind up with what is essentially the same movie.
The mouths of the Transformers move. Just fucking no.
And as much as I like John Turturro he's just a bit too camp for this.
That's about it. The reason I went this way is I passed the fuck out before the end of the movie and woke up to the DVD menu music. That's not a critique of the quality of the film, but rather the quality of the weed.
Final thoughts: Megan Fox has an awesome ass. Transformers in the end is an excellent popcorn movie, made a tad better than most by excellent CGI, solid action, decent acting, and remembering that in the end, this is a movie based on a toy. And it didn't rape my
childhood.
One more for the road...
Overall Rating: Half-Baked (3 out of 5) with a Bonus Toke for an extra .5
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