Man, I paid $9.50 for a matinee, but, then again, it delivered more than $9.50. SarahK was secretly dreading to go this film but ended up loving it. I didn’t quite like the robot designs as they were just too hard to tell apart in the action sequences, but it still was a lot of dumb fun, brought back old memories of the cartoon, and has me looking forward to a sequel. Definitely the summer movie so far.
I’ve been on the fence about Transformers, afraid that it would clash with my memories of the old cartoons, but hell – if it has Frank’s seal of approval that’s enough for me. I just want to know one thing before I go: any cybron cube explosions?
Planning on going today. I don’t know who is more eager, me or my boys. I am such a guy about movies sometimes.
probably one of the best movies ive ever seen… its not up there in the dirty dozen/ apocalypse now range… but damn its close
$9.50 for a matinee? Damn, man, where do you live?
The script really seemed to be lacking, and I question some of the casting, but one cannot argue with the senseless violence. That made up for it.
Yep.. great fun movie!
I paid $11 for a night show.
Stupid Chicago.
(If you’re going with kids, be sure to read the paragraph after the Minor Spoiler Alert)
Saw it yesterday. I didn’t think I’d like it because of the “redesigned” robots, but that didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would (except the fact that Megatron isn’t a gun/cannon of some kind!). The action was really good, and the basic story was fine, but I thought the script was awful. They tried to take the “something for everyone” (like Shrek) route, but failed miserably.
Minor Spoiler Alert*
On the one hand, they seemed to want to make it particularly for kids. You of course had the just-out-of-high-school analyst figuring out the problem before a building-full of senior government analysts. She then says “only one person in the world could figure out this sequence out:” the 17 year old playing video games with l33t h4cking skilz! There was the S7 leader who was wearing a superman-style S7 logo on his undershirt. Then you have the whole scene with the Autobots sneaking around the back yard, wackily stepping on the well-kept lawn and hiding around corners and behind trees while the clueless parents fail to hear a squad of 20′ tall metal robots stomping around outside.
**End Minor Spoiler Alert
On the one hand, they seemed to want to aim it toward the 14-year-old and up male demographic, particularly the late-20’s fans of the original series. There was a surprising amount of strong language, including several uses of s**t, and a man calling his grandmother a b***h. There was the female lead looking under the car hood like she was posing for a mechanic’s calendar. And there was a masturbation joke (dad: why was your door shut? mom: Maybe he was masturbating?… Oh, if you don’t want to call it that, maybe we could use, um, Sam’s Happy Time.). That must have been rather awkward for the guy a couple seats down from me who was there with his two 8-10 year old boys.
None of those are particularly bad on their own (though the joke was stupid), but they’re highly inappropriate for a movie aimed at kids. And the slapstick comedy mentioned in the spoiler section wouldn’t appeal to anybody but a kid. I enjoyed the action sequences, but the script is too schizophrenic for it to be anything other than an afternoon popcorn movie. As soon as it leaves theaters, it’ll be forgotten until the sequel comes out.
I think Transformers fans who dislike this movie because it’s “not the same as the original cartoon” are being a tad hypocritical.
For instance, the designs of the robots. A lot of fans hated the designs when they first leaked pictures of them on the internet because they were so different from the cartoon. Yet none of them objected to the most recent Transformers series (referred to by fans as “The Unicron Trilogy”) even though all the robots in that series got radical redesigns. They also completely forgot the fact that Beast Wars also took a radical departure from the “traditional” look of the original series (both by redesigning the robots and by switching from hand drawing to computer animation), yet that show turned out incredibly good and is now considered one of the best Transformers series ever made.
COMPLETELY agree!! I was “dragged” there by my fiance, but I loved it, too.
(Oh, and I agree, the robot designs were hard to tell apart.)
A grandson turned eight on Friday, and I took him for movie and pizza. He loved it. For an eight year old to sit through two and a half hours of movie says something. We had a good time.
The movie was excellent save for the too short action scenes and the excessively shaky camera. Optimus also didn’t get a good chance to go head to head with Megatron, and just what point did driving the motorcycle under Tankor there serve? Other then those minor quibles, I enjoyed it. I loved the air strike on scorpanok, that was classic.
I had no idea that theater would rape us so violently for a matinée. We won’t be going to that theater ever again.
And the bathrooms were super yucky to boot.
Saw this on Saturday and it kicked ass. There was a fire alarm in the middle of the flick, so they showed the rest of the movie and I got two free passes for more films. This will be watched again and put into the DVD collection when the time comes.
Saw TF yesterday and it was a blast. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen.
One minor quibble, though… in the movie, the tank guy clearly refers to himself as Devastator, but in the toy line, he’s called Brawl. I’m guessing they’ve already got so many Decepticons whose named started with B (Blackout, Barricade, Bonecrusher, Barscream… wait, what?), so they changed Brawl’s name to Devastator to avoid any confusion.
Well, Moonbunny gives it a big PAWS UP on the action, but the script was kind of iffy. The kid playing Sam was pretty good also, very good delivery on most of the slapstick lines he had. He was good in Even Stevens and Holes so he was a great pick for this movie.