I saw the new "Transformers" movie at a matinee on July 4. I really liked it. It was the very first summer "blockbuster" for which I can honestly recommend that you go see it. All they had to do to win me over was to not screw it up. Of course, they may have had a lower bar to jump in re-making what was originally a Saturday morning cartoon rather than the rich and well-developed story line of a long-running comic book series, but still, they did a good job. I would even go so far as to say they fixed a thing or two. First they made BumbleBee a Camaro (first very old and then very new) instead of a Volkswagon Beetle which, I have to say was an improvement. Although I think it would have been much cooler if they had introduced Bumblebee as a '71 Dodge Charger Super Bee and then later as the modern Charger. A nicer fit that would have been. The best do-over though goes to Megatron who I always thought was a bizarre transformer in the cartoon. How exactly does the largest of the bad-guy tranformers convert into a pistol that can be held in the palm of any other transformer? I always thought that was stupid. Well they fixed it in the movie and had Megatron transform into a cannon of vaguely pistol shape, but giant, non-hand-holdable size. The movie also did a really great job of explaining how the transformers chose their familiar "incognito" forms of Earth-machines, which the cartoon never did as far as I know. This explanation opened the door for transformers to adopt multiple on-the-fly incognito shapes if the need arose, but they would do this infrequently enough, and under such desperate circumstances that it was easy to interpret this act as one requiring great amounts of precious "Transformer energy". That is, transforming between humanoid robot form and chosen incognito form was a snap, but adopting a new incognito form seemed a pain in the ass.
No comments:
Post a Comment