mynintendobroke

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Transformers growing up. I followed the cartoon casually as a kid. Obviously, I’m aware of who Optimus Prime is (remember the guy a few years back who legally named his kid Optimus Prime?), but besides sparingly watching the cartoon and having a few toys as a kid, that was the extent of my fandom. So when the movie hit the theaters last year, I wasn’t anywhere near the front of the line waiting to see it. But, I’m a child of the 80’s. So I had to watch this movie at some point, which I did last week.

In case you aren’t familiar with the backdrop: there are two sides of robots, Autobots and Decepticons, who are fighting each other. The Autobots (good guys) are trying to prevent the Decepticons (bad guys) from retrieving some all-powerful cube called the All Spark, which has the ability to both repair the Autobots home planet of Cybertron… or destroy the universe. Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, located the All Spark on Earth, but became frozen in the Arctic Circle ice. About 100 years ago, Captain Witwicky, a famous discoverer, located the frozen Megatron. In the meantime, Witwicky accidentally activated Megatron’s navigational system, and the coordinates of the missing All Spark were imprinted on his eyeglasses. Years later, the U.S. government found the All Spark near the Colorado River, and built the Hoover Dam to conceal both it and the frozen Megatron, while using the All Spark to reverse engineer all our current technology.

The movie begins with a focus on Captain Witwicky’s great-grandson, Sam, as he makes a presentation in school about his famous great-grandfather. Sam eventually catches the eye of Mikaela, a girl in his class that he’s had a crush on for a long time. Unknowingly, the Autobots and Decepticons have begun their race to recover the All Spark on Earth, and Sam and Mikaela are eventually caught in the middle of their quest since they possess the Captain’s eyeglasses.

Who in this picture looks more confident they can help save the world?

OK, so without spoiling anything else in the movie, here are my thoughts. As with any movie based on superheroes and comic books, there are going to be loads of special effects. Throw in Michael Bay as the director, and you’re going to see a lot of stuff blow up, guaranteed. I have to say I was impressed with the special effects, although a lot of times the Transformers themselves seemed a little more bulky and clumsy that I would have imagined. That would’ve been my only complaint. The yellow Camaro, a disguise one of the Autobots uses, was pretty damn nice.

As with any Michael Bay movie, don’t expect a lot of solid performances from the actors. Shia Lebouf tries his best bumbling-teenager, but his character came off as annoying more often than not. Megan Fox… um, yeh she’s about as hot as they come, and the fact she’s good with cars and is portrayed as a “bad girl” in the movie just adds to her allure. John Tuturro, still trying to reclaim the magic that he showed in “Rounders,” plays the leader of Sector 7, a top secret intelligence agency that is in charge of monitoring the All Spark and the frozen Megatron. He generally does a good job, but the script generally left him very little to work with.

Almost worth the price of admission by herself.

Overall, a pretty good effort to adapt from the cartoon and give it a more life-like feel, but the average acting at times took away from the solid plot line and kept this movie from being better than it could have been. This movie definitely took advantage of Megan Fox’s ridiculous figure at every opportunity, and while this provided a her a launching pad for her career, there wasn’t much other substance involved in the movie, at least from the human aspect. From a re-watchability standpoint, I’d watch it again, but I’m not sure it’s DVR quality.

Rating: 6 out of 10

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