Seth’s World View

I grew up with Transformers. I faithfully watched the Generation 1 cartoon and collected the toys. Devastator was quite cool. I enjoyed my Dinobot as well. Transformers: The Movie came out in the 80s to theatres and it was just awesome (well, at the time). The death of Optimus Prime is a significant moment for animated film. They killed off an icon, and it was felt. Other Autobots fell as well. The ascension and transformation of Hotrod to Rodimus was also powerful. Years later, the cartoon series is very much a hard-to-swallow cartoon, and the Movie, well, it is still a children’s movie, but the moments above are still powerful, and make this the best Transformers movie to date.

I had low expectations for the live action Transformers movie. Those expectations were exceeded, mostly by the incredible special effects. Thanks go out to ILM for making the Transformers come to life. And having Peter Cullen reprise his role as Optimus Prime was very cool! The opening sequence was just great, lots of things blowing up, immediate action. The plot was just fine. I’m not expected lots of depth from a plot in this genre. The biggest failure of this movie, in my opinion, is character development. I simply didn’t care about any of the characters. Furthermore, the chemistry between the two teenage leads was non-existant. I almost wonder if George Lucas had a hand it writing the dialogue. Then I realize that I would have preferred Lucas wrote the dialogue. The characters were less than caricatures. The main character, Sam, seemed like he was reading from a book of cliches and one-liners. It was amusing when I wasn’t groaning. An intelligent movie this is not. The scene where Sam is looking for the glasses and the Transformers are hiding from his parents is not only unnecessary, but just plain stupid. I was almost ashamed at seeing my Transformers reduced to that. Running at just over 2 hours long, I think removing the entire storyline revolving around Sam would have made for a much better movie. Overall, it wasn’t a bad movie, I enjoyed watching it, but I didn’t connect with the movie, and I’m a fan. For eye candy, it gets high grades. For substance, there is none. Michael Bay could have done far worse, but the movie could have been much better…if Spielberg would have been the Director instead of Executive Producer.