Non-Political Rant

The other night, me and a couple of friends went and saw "The Transformers". I did not want to see this movie. The fact is that as a child I loved the stupid show and the toys that came with it. As an adult (more or less) I am embarrassed I loved the half hour thin excuse for a commercial. Still, even though the television show was a nonsensical show with a weak motivation for robots to fight each other, the nostalgia was something I didn't want to be messed with. As was said by a commenter over at Punkassblog, "If you were born past 1975, your childhood was sponsored by Viacom, Mattel, and Hasboro".

But, my fiancé and his friends saw the movie, and he told me I should go see it. He swore to me up and down that the movie was much better than the trailers showed, and it had actual plot and character development. So, with some hope, I ponied up the $5.75 and went and saw the matinee.

It didn't start out too bad...a group of Air Force Special Forces joking around the Iraq desert and the evil Decepticons come and blow the hell out of them. But, a plucky group of soldiers with the help of a little Iraqi boy take a picture and survive the attack.

Then it just got bad. It started flipping between characters without any rhyme or reason. And instead of furthering the plot, we get a lot of stupid car chases and battle scenes. And not only are the car chases irrelevant and the explosions contrived, they do that stupid shaky-camera angle thing that I HATE and is the cheapest video trick in the history of the universe. Yes, we get it; it's supposed to be chaotic. We never learn WHY the Decipticons want to take over the earth, or why the Autobots protect us or what really happened on their planet, or where the all-spark came from, or why it was on earth or anything. When a non-speaking robot that shifts into a Camero has the most development, we have a problem.

What's worse, the movie stayed very true to the spirit of the television show. Panasonic, Ikea, Camero, GM, the military, there were so many product placements in this movie that it felt like a 2 and half hour commercial, instead of the half hour commercial that the TV show was. Of course, these "toys" are slightly more expensive, but seriously: that ploy worked when we were seven and hopped up on sugar but as adults, I hope we aren't that stupid.

All in all, a waste of 3 hours, 6 bucks, and a few minutes on my Verizon phone explaining the words "plot" and "character development" to my fiancé.