Movie Report: Transformers

Transformers! Commercial in disguise!

I wasn't planning on going to see this, because the trailer looked like Independence Day with big robots, and I'm not that big of a fan of Independence Day, aka "Something bad will happen to every female in this cast!"

But we heard some good things from friends and J and I wanted to celebrate having access to some of our money again (damn bank ... grrrr) so we hit a matinee.

Weird thing. I run into my boss outside the theater, the guy that some people who play our games call Zeus. Zeus is chillin' at the shopping center with his wife and kid, having a piece of coffeecake. Pantheons these days ... ;-)

I worked for The Star for almost 10 years, and I didn't run into any of my bosses anywhere. Guess they were big on action flicks and comic shops.

First the good stuff: The robots are f'ing cool. The action is non-stop.

Kids of the '80s will get a chill when they hear the original sound effects used in the transformations. John Turturro cracked me up. Bumblebee is smarter than his humans, and quite the pimp -- what does it say when the best characters in the movie are a Camero and a boombox?

And then there's the bad: Everything in this movie is a freaking product placement or advertisement -- how much did the U.S. military pay for its wet, sloppy kiss?

Almost every scene has something stolen from another action movie. The humans, for the most part, are idiots. Apparently most of them are also deaf and blind. All the personality was drained out of the Decepticons like old motor oil.

And the script blew chunks, mostly because it was riddled with "WTF?" moments. A teenage boy gets all huffy and upset because he finds out the smoking hot chick he's inexplicably hooking up with has a juvie record? I dare you to find me a 16-year-old boy in the same situation who wouldn't scream "Score! Bad girls are hot!"

WTF was up with the blond bimbo "computer analyst" and her dumb friends? Why did we spend so much screen time on noobs that the Scooby Doo gang could out-think?

A huge chunk of the movie is spent following the two factions as they race to find a map to the All-Spark. Naturally, we later find out that it was moved by the humans AFTER the map was made. But does that stop them from using the now invalid map to find it? Nope!

The military takes the All-Spark out of the desert and transports it to a highly-populated area why? Because nobody likes Nevada and they want to see it squished by giant robots?

So it was dumb. But strangely, I found it an enjoyable kind of dumb. Summer does things to your brain when you're watching movies.