The Lonely Job, And REVIEW: Transformers aka ROBOT WHUPA$$!
Item one: My weekly post at the Midnight Hour is all about how writing is lonely, and questions I wish I could ask other writers. Some of them are tongue in cheek, others are deadly serious.
Item two: I cannot wait for Harry Potter 7 to be in my hot little hands. I will have to sleep tonight so I can pull another all-nighter tomorrow, so I can finish out my streak of reading each Harry Potter book overnight as soon as I receive it. Ambition, thy name is Lili.
Item three: the Sullen One and I caught a late showing of Transformers last night. Review under the fold, but before you click, know this. In my ever-humble opinion, ROBOTS ARE AWESOME-O! And Good Robot vs. Evil Robot Epic Battles are even more AWESOME with a side of RADICAL SAUCE and a big steaming pile of OMG GEEK LOVE on top.
Too bad the movie sucked a$$ on the plot level. But hey, what do you expect on a movie based on a cheap Hasbro toy line?
Okay, I am a total nerd. Let me just come out of the damn closet and announce right here that I thought the Sullen One was going to either muzzle me or retreat in embarrassment somewhere else in the theater. It cannot be cool sitting next to a 30-year-old chick who keeps squirming and whispering, “Robot battle! Bad robot! Good robot! ROBOTS!” with the barely-contained glee of an evil seven-year-old boy.
The CGI robots were fantastic. The battle between Megatron and Optimus Prime needed to last a LOT LONGER. If the movie had been total CGI Robot Whupass I would have been happy as a dog with twenty trees to pee on. The scorpion robot that scuttled under the sand? Sent me into transports of glee unmatched since the credits of the first LOTR movie, when my sister and I breathed in unison, “Thank you, God, it did not suck.”
I mean, come on. Huge mechanical scorpion with enough firepower to destroy a WHOLE VILLAGE? Who can not love this?
The rest of the movie pretty much sucked. It was your basic band-of-misfits-saves-the-world, decent-weakling-boy-gets-girl-after-huge-experience, swelling-soundtrack-means-you-should-feel-something pile of steaming doo. Granted, Shia LaBeouf pulls of a great “stuttering geekazoid” act, and the duo that plays his parents provide much-needed comic relief. Jon Voight is delightfully plastic-surgery-creepy as a Secretary of Defense who is actually in touch with reality. (Any chance we can get him appointed? Heh.) Josh Duhamel was pretty believable as a soldier, plus he’s cute to look at. The rest of the cast was forgettable, except for Bernie Mac as a used-car salesman. That was about the only really, honestly funny part of the film.
All in all there was too much goddamn “human interest” bull in the film and not enough ROBOT DESTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING! And OMG Hugo Weaving was the voice of Megatron. *wriggles with glee*
Each time the movie slowed down to show the Hero and the Heroine Falling In Luuurve/Conflict, or the Quirky Supporting Players Getting Quirky, or the Tremenjus Earth-Shattering Danger, we all just waited impatiently for the next helping of ROBOT BATTLE. The soundtrack threatened to bust its confines like Eve Mendes’s tatas threaten to bust her shirts–so often the prospect loses all appeal.
I was happy to see they had stuck pretty closely to the comic/TV show for the Transformers, especially Optimus Prime as a pimped-out Kenworth. Starscream and Jazz were instantly recognizable, and Megatron was suitably eeeebil-looking. The Decepticons all had red eyes, the Autobots blue, and there was no ambiguity, storytelling, or genre-busting in sight.
But there was plenty of chaos, destruction, and a ROBOT SHAPED LIKE A SCORPION THAT COULD SWIM UNDER SAND, YO!
It was a good thing I visited the loo before the picture, or I might have had an embarrassing moment when Scorponok rose up out of the sand and started laying waste.
The dialogue was as cheesy as you’d expect, with Optimus Prime getting in enough exposition to choke a large moose, stuffed full of Hallmark-card faux nobility. Basically, you could plug your ears with cotton wool and comfortably sit through the movie, because the explosions will hit you in the chest and tell you when ROBOTS are kicking a$$.
I will admit, the masturbation joke was funny, but only in a cringing “I can’t believe they’re sinking this low even in this movie” sort of way. It got a laugh from the theater full of smelly geek boys and jocks with dates, at least.
Anyway, it was an enjoyable waste of about ten bucks per ticket, but only if you love Robot Battles. Which I do, with all my cold, dead little heart.
Robots. Chaos. Destruction. Screaming. Explosions.
*surveys journal entry with satisfied air*
My work here is done.
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