Movie Reviews - new films reviewed

Thousands of years ago, the the planet Cybertron was destroyed in a civil war between the Autonomous Robotic Lifeform (Autobots) and the Decepticons. In the curse of the destruction of Cybertron, the “Allspark”, a device with the power to create and destroy, was lost and eventually landed on Earth. Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, traced the Allspark to Earth, but was frozen and trapped in arctic ice and later discovered by Archibald Witwicky in 1897. The Allspark’s coordinates got imprinted in Archibald’s eyeglasses.
Today: Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) offers Archibald’s eyeglasses on ebay to earn some money for his first car. His father buys him an old 1976 Chevrolet Camaro which turns out to be one of the Autobots, Bumblebee. Both the Decepticons and the Autobots have come to Earth to retrieve the Allspark, and while the Autobots want to protect mankind, the Decepticons have come to destroy.
It’s up to Autobot leader Optimus Prime, his fellow Autobots, Sam Witwicky and his love interest Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) to protect Earth from Megatron and his evil Decepticons.

A Michael Bay-movie about the fight of good vs. evil robots, based on action toys? Sounds scary. But Transformers is also produced by Steven Spielberg (a huge Transformers fan), and The Beardy One’s handwriting is clearly visible in the boy/car, boy/robot, boy/girl and boy/family relationships. Shia LaBeouf is clearly a Spielbergian character (outsider, “loser”, saves the Earth and gets the girl) and he can prove himself against all the CGI action, while Megan Fox is hot but looks overburdened with acting against nothing but a pole sometimes.
And it’s the human relationships and humor – provided by ace supporting actors John Turturro as super-secret agent Simmons and Anthony Anderson as hacker Glen Whitmann – that really shine. The much talked about CGI may be state of the art, but the transformations and much of the robot infights are really eye-boggling – maybe my vision is degraded and i’m too slow, but i couldn’t make out much more than blurry-shiny-colored undefined motions in most of that scenes.
Overall the mix of Bay-ish action and Spielbergian humanity (with fitting references to Armageddon and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial) is a successful experiment and should leave fans of both satisfied and entertained. A bit too long, though.

TRANSFORMERS Movie Trailer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under 3-star-movies, 4-star-movies. 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.