I remember seeing the previews last winter, a teaser that gave a glimpse of what was to come—Transformers, the movie. I also recall thinking, “this really could go either way…a movie with great potential to be really cool, or it just might bomb because of the way they handled its recreation.”

It bombed.

For starters, I do have to make the disclaimer, that the effects did totally rock in this movie. Over-the-top and unbelievable, sure. But they were still well done and the overall CG work was remarkable.

And that’s about where the goodness ends for me. The rest of it blew chunks and there was no way that excellent CG work was going to transform this film into anything I’d ever want to watch again.

The storyline was weak to begin with—the fate of the world resting in a high schooler’s hands—and littered with the same cheesey phrases and rhetoric that was prevalent throughout the cartoon version of Transformers. And when I say cheesey, I don’t know how else to put it, but like so: if I was lactose intolerant, I would have farted all my internal organs out my ass. How’s that for a visual? That’s how cheesey it was.

And when Optimus Prime wasn’t dishing out melodramatic one-liners, we were being assaulted with product placement after product placement and being brainwashed into feel-good visuals of the United States military—the thrill of being in an Air Force base, the energy inside the war room, and the sheer magnitude of being able to fly an F-22 Raptor into combat and taking out an objective.

Seriously, I see enough advertisements over the course of my day, I really didn’t need to spend $9.00 a head to be slathered in placements by Chevy, HP, Nokia, Porche, and dozens of other less obvious placements throughout the film. It was a pure American consumerist all-you-can-eat fiesta of “I’ve got to have that”.

And if it wasn’t enough to be assaulted with all the product placement and the advertisements for the US Military, we saw the glorification of the automobile at the expense of wasting non-renewable energy (gasoline) and further contributing to the problem of pollution by showing us how cool it would be to own a gas-guzzling, air polluting Chevy Camero.

I could go on and on about this film. It was really cheesey, it was drowning in product placement, and lacked a credible fiction storyline.

Don’t bother seeing it. Wait til it hits the cheapo theatres or rental. It’s just not worth the cash at the box office.

July 5, 2007, 8:53 pm

Filed under: Culture, General

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