A review, by Lileks:
It’s ridiculous to think about “Transformers 3” for more than six seconds, since it concerns “living mechanical creatures” who evolved into bipeds capable of rearranging their structure to resemble cars and trucks, even though these things do not exist on their planet. They were known as Autobots, even though those things do not exist on their planet. Then they got into a war with the Decepticons, beings who display absolutely no skill at nomenclature. If you are in the business of deception, so much so that it permeates your entire culture, it does you no service to announce the fact in your name. “Are you telling me the truth, Mr. Decepticon?” “Oh, absolutely.”
But if this bothers you, consider that you are watching a movie that has a robot from another planet who speaks in a Scottish accent. There are no words to describe the complete & utter . . . AUUUUUGHHHHH that produces in your critical brain. You can buy everything else, if you want; you can even make up some story about how they can really shape-shift into anything, not just cars, and “Autobots” is what it sounds like in our language, and really they call themselves something else, but when a character from the other side of the galaxy WHO IS A ROBOT talks in the accent of a particular part of a small island in the Northern Hemisphere, you know you’re dealing with large groups of people who don’t give a crap. The entire franchise is predicated on the unwillingness of anyone to ever utter the phrase “but that makes absolutely no sense” during any part of the creative process. Oh, I know why he speaks with a Scottish accent: he’s an engineer, and Scotty had such an accent. Ergo. Of course ergo. But it’s still wrong.
So it’s all stupid. It’s a stupid cartoon for little boys. This is fine if your inner little-boy can be coaxed out to enjoy the carnage, and your adult brain can enjoy the disjointed flow (action! broad comedy! heartwarming stuff! offkilter guy yelling a lot! action! drama!) and skip all the Trials of Shia nonsense that fill up the first hour.The only reason it has any resonance to someone who meets the technical definition of adulthood is because A) Optimus Prime sounds really wise and noble and moving, and damn, you just like the big guy, and B) it’s interesting to watch all that stuff coming at you. The CGI on this thing is just amazing. The battle in Chicago, which consumes the final seven hours of the movie, is a thing to behold.
Unfortunately, it too infested with humans. The script is designed to make you loathe every moment wasted with the human actors. GET BACK TO THE ROBOTS! No one acts like people act. No one says things people would say in these situations. Everyone is an archetype devoid of embellishment. The only way to watch the movie is to hit the NEXT CHAPTER button and unless there is a robot in the FIRST SECOND OF THE CHAPTER, hit next, because they had their chance to give you robots and they missed it. Repeat until movie is over.
I think I’ll pass. But go read the whole Bleat — there are bonus pics of classical composers, and thoughts on the elusive and mysterious nature of memories.
I can forgive robots with Scottish accents – but not human soldiers carrying around M-4s against metal bad guys the size of Buicks. Plus the fact that, Shia Labeouf has absolutely no Elvis in him.
I hate myself for even saying this, but it was explained in the movie. Apparently getting hosed down with bullets screws up the robots’ sensors. We also see soldiers sniping out the eyes of robots, and some other creative ways the meatbags use to take down the bad guys. It’s a little thing, but the fact that humans were actually somewhat of a threat to the robots added some tension and consequence to the action.
There’s a lot to not like about the movies – but two of the things that jumped out at me (as a former cartoon watcher) is that they specifically explain why they transform into cars and they pretty well covered how they learned how to speak english. Both of these were in the first movie so maybe he hasn’t done enough research.
I’ve watched the entire Transformers movie collection solely for the visual candy and the exercise my receiver gets. It’s like porn, you seriously can’t expect the plot to be anymore than a device to get you from one scene to another. But as K and Lilek’s point out, its getting increasingly harder with each installment to suspend disbelief. Robots with dialects and humans firing small caliber bullets at machines 3 stories tall? Just get me to the scene were the robots fight each other. After all, the animated series rarely had any human interaction. In fact, much of the series was Autobots trying to enforce sort of a prime directive protocol on Decepticons.
Transformers 3 was the first time I rented from RedBox. I typically buy movies to see the “making of portions”. I just didn’t care this time, and glad I spent only $1.50 to see it.
Thankfully, this is supposed to be the last one; well, with Bay at the helm, anyway. Hopefully they’ll let the franchise rest for a while (at least until 2013-14), and then try again with a director that doesn’t have ADHD.
It became less like porn the moment they ditched Megan Fox.
Agree with reading the rest of the bleat. I was dealing with the second subject myself just yesterday. I had a collection of Louis Armstrong music that I wanted to tag with a photo. But what photo? The compilation is a new “digitally mastered” versions, but I wanted a picture that reflected Satchmo at the time he originally recorded the music. It takes a bit of research to find release dates and then find pictures based on those years. The process tells you a bit more about the artist and the music.
Even when I was as close to the target age group for the Transformers franchise I couldn’t get myself interested in it. And the continuing addition of new sets of characters to mirror the new toy lines — dinosaur Transformers? Really? — didn’t help.
I only followed through Gen I. Once the dinosaurs came out, I dumped it for Robotech, which (unless you include Speed Racer years earlier) was the full extent of my interest in anime.
As a former Robotech comics artist and writer, I thank you for your patronage.
[Raising hand like Tom Hanks] “I don’t get it.”
I loved the cartoon as a kid. Two things ruined the movies for me:
1) Way too much Megan Fox and general innuendo; I had to make my own abridged version of the original movie so my son could watch it with me
2) The robots look insanely complex — so much so that most of the time I couldn’t even tell who was who or what one was doing to another. It was all just a whirlwind of jagged shiny polygons. Much preferred the basic forms presented in the cartoon. Surely these could’ve been cleaned up and made to look cool without all the jaggedy nonsense, no?
By the way, (2) reflects in the quality of the merchandising, too. My son has some of the modern Transformers toys and they are cheap plastic frak compared to the originals. They don’t even fold up right, and the parts fall off if you sneeze near them. As they say on Monday Night Football, “C’mon, Man!”