Emily Belsey

So sad. I had such hopes for this movie. And not even high hopes, just hopes of being entertained.

I saw Transformers tonight. Wasn’t expecting anything spectacular or breathtaking, but I was expecting to be at least entertained.

I guess I should have read the reviews a little closer.

But I’m torn.

Because the first half of the movie was really cool. LaBeouf was really funny (not to mention really cute), the car was awesome (soooo wanted to trade in my trusty Honda for a Camaro like Sam’s), and the plot had potential.

It was exciting, tense, witty, engaging, and I cared about the characters.  Well, most of them.

But about halfway through the movie, I just stopped caring.  I was getting bored.  I started talking to my friend during the movie (I think he was just as bored as I was), shifting in my seat, even resorted to thinking about what I’m going to do today (it’s about 12:30 a.m.).

The plot had gone way south, with too many characters bouncing around to make any sort of credible storyline, and the dialogue was just so lame!

The dialogue alternated between cheap, common phrases like “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod!!!” to fake, final-speech-before-final-battle wisdom like “At the end of the day, one will stand, one will fall.”  I just kept thinking to myself, “That’s it??  That’s the best they could come up with??”  I think if they’d invested just a little bit more in good dialogue and plot development, this would have been a much better movie.

So what saved (marginally) the movie for me?  The special effects.  Yep, after the “story” left the movie, I kept watching just to see the cars change into Autobots and back again.  And on a DPL screen, it was pretty cool.

So do I recommend this movie?  Sure, if action toys and cool cars are your thing.  But don’t expect to be blown away by the story.

Actually, now that I think about it, the Autobots remind me of the Ents in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Calm, tolerant of lesser species, and way cool about saving the day, both the Ents and the Autobots are widescreen wonders to behold.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 12:42 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.