Transformers (Film)
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Transformers (Film)
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Michael Bay (dir.). Film, US, 144 mins. Few things in the universe can claim to possess the terrible majesty of this movie. A black hole, perhaps, might come close, but you’d be annoyed when your popcorn, cola and hotdogs got sucked into it! Few films have done so much on screen – given so much! Ensuring that the screen is constantly full of spectacle, Transformers is both magnificent and munificent. This is a generous, generous movie. Even someone who hated every second of it couldn’t possibly walk out of the cinema feeling short-changed.It does things that previously could only have been done in animation, comics, books or a child’s imagination – giant robots, smashing each other into buildings, hiding from parents, and peeing oil on buffoons!It’s impossible not to compare Superman Returns to this movie in less than flattering terms. Superman Returns might have had more affecting character development, but where were the super-brawls? If it had been a low-budget indie film about a divorced man returning to his old home town and running into his ex-wife it could have kept everything that was good about Superman Returns and lost nothing particularly important. If the producers of Transformers had taken a similarly disappointing approach, we’d have had 144 minutes of an elderly Sam Witwicky looking mournfully at yellow VW Beetles. Thankfully they did not! Instead what we have is hour after amazing hour of glorious robotic indulgence! Where the five Superman films so far have pathetically produced just four super-powered adversaries (if you take Superman II out of the equation, that leaves just one super-villain in four films!), Transformers throws in robot after robot, ripping the screen apart in a symphony of machinery that builds to a crescendo of all-out robotic carnage! Shia LeBoeuf, as Sam Witwicky, has an effortless charm that holds it all together, in what can be a very thankless role – think of Courtney Cox’s game but ultimately futile efforts to bring some human interest to Masters of the Universe. Who wants the camera pointed at a puny human when there are much cooler things to be looking at?Transformers might not be the best movie of all time, but it is almost definitely the most awesome! – SWTOriginally published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #18. |
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