What In Tarnation?!?!? In the Classroom

I wanted this movie to do only one thing. Just one. Remind me of my childhood watching the Autobots and the Decepticons battling it out on planet Earth. That’s all. If the movie gussied up the animation with some swanky looking CGI, all the better then. It should have been a slam dunk right?

Well it wasn’t boys and girls, it wasn’t. The biggest issue that I had with this movie was probably its PG-13 rating. With that kind of license the movie makers got to include all kinds of inappropriate and unneeded adult humor and language. This movie did not need to be a cuss fest. In fact it should have been rather benign on that front. This is a movie that kids are going to want to see. This is a movie that young parents are going to want to take their kids to and share that magic that is Transformers. The movie makers had another idea I am afraid. And it totally ruined what could have been a movie that I really liked because the core of what Transformers is there in the movie.

So here now is a bulleted list of things that would have made this movie much more enjoyable. I might get a bit spoilerish here so fair warning.

• Someone other than Michael Bay directing. Looking at Mr. Bay’s filmography reveals a steaming pile of crap. (Well, I kinda like The Rock.) It saddens me to see that he is currently in talks to do Transformers 2. Really, would it kill him to keep the camera still for longer than 0.028 seconds? Seriously. I want to actually see and understand what is going on during some of the fights.
• More Optimus Prime and Megatron! It took forever for Prime to show up and even longer than Megatron to be defrosted.
• David Kaye doing the voice of Megatron. Excellent! Yessss! (David did the voice of Megatron on the excellent series Beast Wars Transformers.) Thankfully they had the presence of mind to hire Peter Cullen as Prime.
• I would have like to see Shia LaBeouf play a different character other than the one we see in Disturbia. The only difference is Spike Sam is about 50 times more annoying.
• A plot without so many holes (a few examples):
  • We learn in the beginning of the movie that the only way to control the Transformers is basically freeze them. Sector 7 (kinda like the men in black) has know this for quite awhile. They even capture a Transformer by cooling him down but when it comes to the final battle the army can only shoot rather ineffective bombs and missiles at them. Those are like the opposite of cold. Why does the army completely forget what they knew?
  • Why doesn’t Megatron have something to cover up his spark so annoying little earthlings don’t shoving things up there?
  • At one point, the MacGuffin, the Allspark, starts turing random electronic equipment into new transformers. First question, why are all the new bots all evil? Secondly, what happened to them? We see an xBox and a Mountain Dew machine turn into transformers, they get loud and disappear. Is there a transformed Mountain Dew machine and xBox running around killing people?
• Less cursing and adult humor.
• More Transformer mythology (which the movies does contain some).
• At least a brief segment of the Transformers theme song. It could have been played during the credits and I would have been happy.

I did find it interesting that young dads were taking their rather young children to see this movie. I would say that there were at least seven dads in our showing. Sad part is, this movie wasn’t for kids. The poor tyke behind me couldn’t distinguish between the “good robots and the bad ones” and spent the whole movie cowering in fear. Then there were the repeated threats from his father that his face was going to be slapped off if he didn’t stop whining. There was quite a bit of poor parenting going on.

So the one thing I would want parents to take away from all this is don’t take your kids. It isn’t for them. I know they want to see it but the first hour or so is pretty filthy so go out and find the original series on video or even better, find Beast Wars. And also don’t threaten your kids, telling them you are going to slap their face off. Just a tip from Uncle Christopher.

Also remember Michael Bay: bad.

Also, should I be concerned that the same guys the wrote this script is writing the script for the new re-imagining of Star Trek?

Sigh.

Later taters!