Transformers, Bigger, Longer...and Unnecessary

File this one under 'Why?!' but Coming Soon reports that Transformers (2007) is on its way to IMAX screens on September 21st. To entice viewers who have already seen the soulless giant robots movie on the big screen, viewers might expect the studio would offer viewers a chance to see all or at least part of the film in 3-D a la the IMAX presentations of Superman Returns and Harry Potter 5. And those viewers would be wrong, too.

No, Dreamworks and Paramount decided that the best way to keep the IMAX presentation from being a total rip-off (as opposed to the original rip-off that was the actual movie itself) is to add more scenes. There's no word on whether the added scenes will feature more robotic carnage, but how much do you want to bet we will have to settle for more scenes of Anthony Anderson eating donuts, or even better, that team of soldiers I cared so much about? ((crosses fingers)) Man, I hope we get more scenes with those way awesome soldiers!

I guess you might have now realized by now that I didn't care too much for Transformers. I was working out of town when it came out, so I didn't really get a chance to talk about it on the show.

A friend once told me that no one should be disappointed with a Michael Bay film, but when I had originally heard that Bay was going to direct Transformers, I was excited. I loved all the toys and tv series as a kid, and if any established director seemed to have been working their way towards making a film about talking robots that turn into cars, I thought it was Michael Bay.

Watch any of his films, and you will see an auteur who has absolute contempt for mankind in general. When Bay isn't filming characters as they throw dead fat people out of a car or a pair of buddy cops ogling a female corpse with large breasts like he did in Bad Boy's 2, he's depicting various non-whites with broad rascist strokes like the random appearance of geisha in Pearl Harbor. See, Bay hates humans, because the first love of his life is cars, planes, helicopters, tanks - you name it. So with all of this in mind, when I went to see Transformers I was let down by the fact that the movie actually focused a good deal on human characters. A lot of them. I wouldn't have minded too much if the movie was called, Anthony Anderson: The Movie, or Stock Soldier Characters: The Movie, but for a movie called Transformers, there weren't a whole lot of Transformers, and I for one was a little dissapointed. Plus Transformers had a lot of lame masturbation humor that was not appropriate for a film being marketed to small kids via toys and Lunchable tie-ins. Granted, the scores of human characters were concieved by screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, but they should have known going into this thing that Michael Bay doesn't do humans and written most of them out of the script. What we should have gotten was a movie about a boy and his car - his car than can turn into a giant badass robot who shoots aqua, sphere-shaped energy blast out of his wrists. I mean where did that film go? And to top it all, Bay set up about 96% of all the action in this film with this scatter-shot method that does nothing more for me than reveal a director who has no confidence in his own work. Bay merely shatters the rules of editing because he could - not because he should. The result is disorienting. Other than the Starscream sequence, I really had no idea as to who or what was shooting, punching, or kicking another character or object, nor where they came from in the geography of a scene or where they were going.

In all actuality, Bay's scattershot method is probably the real reason IMAX didn't dare try to convert this movie in 3-D (or maybe they did, and someone in a test audience died of a seizure). In 3-D, the audiences' eyes have to adjust with every unique shot. This is why audiences get a headache when a 3-D movie is projected poorly, as the eyes continuously struggle to adjust. When dealing with a director who feels the need to change the shot every 2 seconds (i.e. Bay), the result in 3-D could cause his audience to have migranes, nausea, vomiting, etc. I guess Dreamworks realized that some audience members already got these symptoms from watching the regular version and didn't think the 3-D conversion was worth the expense.

The only good thing that ever came out of Transformers: The Movie was the following parody. Enjoy:



BONUS!!!!
The Top 5 List of American Theatrical Films to Feature Giant, Transforming Robots:

1)Transformers: The Movie (1986)

2) Hasn't been made yet.

3) Hasn't been made yet.

4) Hasn't been made yet.

5)(TIE)GoBots: War of the Rocklords and Transformers