GuppyShark wrote:Finally, as someone who wasn't really all that impressed with the film, I want to make clear I still think that Egbert's review is fucking terrible. Damned near every sentence is a blatant falsehood.
I found most of his criticisms accurate.
As for my own additional criticisms, the intensity of the movie kept rising and falling, rising and falling that it started losing my attention and I started becoming bored during the middle. The Decepticons are woefully underpowered; what happened to the kind of base raping Blackout gave at the beginning of T1? As said by others, the weaknesses of T1 have not been fixed, merely brushed under the rug with Bay hoping that more explosions would make us forget about.
The Optimus fight/death scene was well done, though. I would have preferred to see more of Optimus in the movie with his death coming closer to the end. One thing I really felt this movie lacked that the first one did well was his interaction with the Autobots.
Ph34r teh eyebrow!!11!Writers GuildSluggitePawn of ChaosWYGIWYGAINGW so now i have to put ACPATHNTDWATGODW in my sigEBC-Honorary Geordie Hammerman! Hammer!
That's easily the dumbest thing I've seen this week. If the author was going for cheap laughs, he hit them about as well as the movie did. If he's serious, then he paid about as much attention to the movie as Ebert did.
Seriously, a thing with sharp pointy things on two ends is now a phallic symbol? What kind of dick was he born with?
It's Jodan, not Jordan. If you can't quote it right, I will mock you.
Okay, saw the movie today. First off, I liked it. I went in expecting a mindless slugfest between pretty cgi robots and the military with a skeleton plot to give them a reason to duke it out, and I was not unsatisfied.
What I liked...
- Optimus. He's noble, heroic, and utterly bad-ass, even though he spends a good deal of the movie dead before pulling his prerequisite Jesus-manuever at the end.
- Bumblebee. Kind of like Optimus, but much more focused on a single person.
- Megatron and Starscream. I absolutely loved the banter between the two and the expansion of their characters and the relationship they have. Megatron is a ruthless asshole who will do anything to further the goals of his idol. Starscream is cautious to the point of cowardice, but unconcerned with moral qualms. Megatron doesn't like Starscream, knows that the latter would stab him in the back if given half a chance, but also knows that Starscream's fairly competent and too cowardly to actually betray him, and thus keeps him around.
- Jetfire. Him giving the "I'm getting too old for this shit," line was made of win.
- The military. Once again they prove that they aren't going to get utterly steamrolled, and manage to hold their own pretty well.
What I didn't like...
- The romance plot, on many levels.
I understand the movie needed some sort of relationship-plot to move things along, but this one was completely fucking idiotic and immature. Okay, you wander into your boyfriend's room to find him snogging another girl, you're pissed, you storm off, understandable. You come back a few moments later to find out that girl's a Decepticon who's doing bad things to him and you... accuse him of cheating while she's chasing you and shooting at you?
No, either she's fucking retarded or my suspension of disbelief has been shattered with a nuke. You've dealt with these killer alien robots before and know, firsthand, that they will do whatever it takes to get what they want without any moral concerns. Once you find out that the girl your boyfriend was snogging is actually one of those killer robots, your first thoughts should be, "Holy shit, she's raping him!", not, "He's a cheating bastard."
It's even worse because he's *not* a cheating bastard. He stayed faithful to her to a retarded level the whole time and Decepticon-bitch pretty much had to rape him. Of course he's also a spineless pussy and doesn't have the balls to man up and tell this fact to his flighty girlfriend. Probably for the better since she seems to have the good judgment and intelligence of a meth addict.
In a related vein, I despised the whole "I can't say I love you," subplot with a passion. Maybe it's just me, but I say, "I love you," to a lot of people, all of whom I love, on a regular basis. Here's a hint: If you're incapable of saying "I love you," to someone, then either you're *not* in a relationship with them, or you're in a very unhealthy relationship with them. Or you're a pair of retarded pre-teens.
- Devastator. Already thoroughly covered by others.
- The final Optimus/Megatron/Fallen battle. Holy crap was that an anticlimax. All that lead-up, the looming threat of this sun-destroying weapon, and it's blown apart in what looks like A SINGLE, HALF-HEARTED SHOT from Optimus. The looming threat of the Fallen, this being of incredible evil and power... and both he and Megatron get their asses handed to them by Uber-Optimus in less than thirty seconds. I know Optimus is bad-ass, and I know Optimus + Jetfire parts should be all but unstoppable, but I also know that the Fallen should be something of almost incalcuble power. I wanted to see a desperate stand-off between the three with Optimus only barely coming out on top. Hell, I would have preferred to see the Fallen survive to return in a later movie, just to further establish his allegedly great power.
- Megatron's upgrades. If Megatron is iconic for anything, it should be the fact that he transforms either into a BFG, or something that mounts a BFG. He got all these new upgrades when he was resurrected, but what do we see of them? Half a second of a tank running the autobots off the road before the big Optimus sacrifice fight, Megatron using tank-treads to beat down Starscream, and half a second of a tank RUNNING AWAY from the military air strike. What the fuck? I'm sorry, but I want more tank.
- Megan Fox. Okay, yes she has a mildly nice body and nice face. I don't care how many horny fanboys I offend by saying this: I was sick of both that body and that face by the end of the movie. What was it, somewhere around thirty minutes total? Half an hour devoted to nothing more than slow-motion shots of Megan's ass and bouncy tits while she's running, sweating and getting dirty. It was only ten minutes or so into the movie before my Rhi and I were chanting 'Faaaan Seeervice!' at every slow-mo shot of Megan's jugs.
Minor inconsistancies/nitpicks
- The twins fighting it out with Devastator. Then... they're gone and Devastator's on the pyramid. Did they die? Run away? What the hell? I get the impression that something important got left on the editing-room floor.
- Megatron's resurrection. The military says they see five radar signatures heading down to Megs' grave. Then a bit later they claim there are now six signatures coming back up. Sure, Megs was resurrected, but one of the Decepticons were sacrificed in the process, so shouldn't there still only be five signatures?
Answering other points
Why does the Fallen somehow magically get the Matrix Key when it has to be earned? Remember, back when humans were tribal, the robots fought a war with each other to prevent him from using it to activate the sun-destroying thingie. Obviously he 'earned' it long ago and still has the capability to use it to this day.
Gaian Paradigm: Because not all fantasy has to be childish crap. Ephemeral Pie: Because not all role-playing has to be shallow. My art: Because not all DA users are talentless emo twits. "Phant, quit abusing the He-Wench before he turns you into a caged bitch at a Ren Fair and lets the tourists toss half munched turkey legs at your backside." -Mr. Coffee
Oni Koneko Damien wrote:
In a related vein, I despised the whole "I can't say I love you," subplot with a passion. Maybe it's just me, but I say, "I love you," to a lot of people, all of whom I love, on a regular basis. Here's a hint: If you're incapable of saying "I love you," to someone, then either you're *not* in a relationship with them, or you're in a very unhealthy relationship with them. Or you're a pair of retarded pre-teens.
Of course, if you're in an action movie, and you say it before the end, one of you won't make it that far.
Oni Koneko Damien wrote:
- Megatron's resurrection. The military says they see five radar signatures heading down to Megs' grave. Then a bit later they claim there are now six signatures coming back up. Sure, Megs was resurrected, but one of the Decepticons were sacrificed in the process, so shouldn't there still only be five signatures?
Perhaps they resurrected Blackout off screen and he was one of the signatures coming back up?
Oni Koneko Damien wrote:
- The looming threat of the Fallen, this being of incredible evil and power... and both he and Megatron get their asses handed to them by Uber-Optimus in less than thirty seconds. I know Optimus is bad-ass, and I know Optimus + Jetfire parts should be all but unstoppable, but I also know that the Fallen should be something of almost incalcuble power. I wanted to see a desperate stand-off between the three with Optimus only barely coming out on top.
I have to agree with others on this. While I would have liked a much longer, more complete ending battle between Megs, Prime, and the Fallen, I get bored with the standard "he's losing for 5 minutes until that last 30 seconds when he pulls the strength together to win" meme. I don't think it was unreasonable to have all 3 of them bashed and bruised, not necessarily with Prime "losing" till the last minute, but on relative equal terms with two powerful foes. The battle could have gone on longer, but not necessarily with Prime struggling more than the enemy.
Hell, I would have preferred to see the Fallen survive to return in a later movie, just to further establish his allegedly great power.
This I agree with, if only to have Tony Todd's voice back. He makes a great villain with that voice of his, and a good Fallen.
It's Jodan, not Jordan. If you can't quote it right, I will mock you.
Clone Sergeant wrote:Perhaps they resurrected Blackout off screen and he was one of the signatures coming back up?
Apparently, that wasn't Blackout at all. His name was Grindor.
Oni Koneko Damien wrote:
I understand the movie needed some sort of relationship-plot to move things along, but this one was completely fucking idiotic and immature.
Teenagers doing something immature. How ridiculous!
Okay, you wander into your boyfriend's room to find him snogging another girl, you're pissed, you storm off, understandable. You come back a few moments later to find out that girl's a Decepticon who's doing bad things to him and you... accuse him of cheating while she's chasing you and shooting at you?
No, either she's fucking retarded or my suspension of disbelief has been shattered with a nuke. You've dealt with these killer alien robots before and know, firsthand, that they will do whatever it takes to get what they want without any moral concerns. Once you find out that the girl your boyfriend was snogging is actually one of those killer robots, your first thoughts should be, "Holy shit, she's raping him!", not, "He's a cheating bastard."
To be fair, the fact that she turned out to be a Pretender (According to the novelization (and the TF Wiki), she took the form from an animatronic Alice In Wonderland robot, and thus her real name could very well be Alice) Decepticon doesn't actually excuse him kissing her before finding that out
That is to say, from what little she saw, she had no way of telling he was being raped or seduced.
- The final Optimus/Megatron/Fallen battle. Holy crap was that an anticlimax. All that lead-up, the looming threat of this sun-destroying weapon, and it's blown apart in what looks like A SINGLE, HALF-HEARTED SHOT from Optimus. The looming threat of the Fallen, this being of incredible evil and power... and both he and Megatron get their asses handed to them by Uber-Optimus in less than thirty seconds. I know Optimus is bad-ass, and I know Optimus + Jetfire parts should be all but unstoppable, but I also know that the Fallen should be something of almost incalcuble power. I wanted to see a desperate stand-off between the three with Optimus only barely coming out on top. Hell, I would have preferred to see the Fallen survive to return in a later movie, just to further establish his allegedly great power.
Keep in mind earlier in the movie he was doing a damn good job of fending off Megatron, Starscream, and Grindor all by himself.
- Megatron's upgrades. If Megatron is iconic for anything, it should be the fact that he transforms either into a BFG, or something that mounts a BFG. He got all these new upgrades when he was resurrected, but what do we see of them? Half a second of a tank running the autobots off the road before the big Optimus sacrifice fight, Megatron using tank-treads to beat down Starscream, and half a second of a tank RUNNING AWAY from the military air strike. What the fuck? I'm sorry, but I want more tank.
I'll agree that we could have used more Alt-mode utilization overall.
Answering other points
Why does the Fallen somehow magically get the Matrix Key when it has to be earned? Remember, back when humans were tribal, the robots fought a war with each other to prevent him from using it to activate the sun-destroying thingie. Obviously he 'earned' it long ago and still has the capability to use it to this day.
Alternately, the fact that he was a Prime too meant that they couldn't deny it from him so easily/at all.
Not an armored Jigglypuff
"I salute your genetic superiority, now Get off my planet!!" -- Adam Stiener, 1st Somerset Strikers
Prime held off Megatron pretty well on his own. And when he was confronted by Grindor and Starscream as well, he went into some kind of berserk mode and ripped Starscream's arm off, and slashed Grindor repeatedly before giving a Coup de grace. Well, when you are fighting 3 in one go, the odds are already against you and Optimus made a good record for himself all things considered.
STGOD: Byzantine Empire Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
Kreia
So if we take the number from this interview with Bay
There is so much waste in this business, directors who have big shows like this one, who keep a second unit for the entire time. We were able to make this for $194 million, instead of the $230-270 million that the average sequel of this nature seems to cost.
And put it with the 160 million global figure for TF2's Wed/Thurs takings from boxofficemojo that would seem to be most of the thing's budget earned back in the opening two days.
You know it looked like to me that Megan Fox was the victim of domestic violence. I mean her lips were swollen like she had been punched in the mouth several times and someone busted her lips. Or maybe she just had the doctor go crazy with the collagen injections... either way it detracted from her looks for me.
As for the rest of the movie, there was some good and bad but it was a fun flick.
I would like to know why every time the cube energy makes a new transformer they are evil and start trying to kill people.
"War.... it's faaaaaantastic!" <--- Hot Shots:Part Duex "Psychos don't explode when sunlight hits them, I don't care how fucking crazy they are!"~ Seth from Dusk Till Dawn
|BotM|Justice League's Lethal Protector
I saw it on IMAX yesterday. I will say that I was entertained. I cringed a lot, rolled my eyes a lot, but in the end I saw giant robots kick the shit outta each other and get blown up by virtually every piece of military hardware in the U.S. arsenal, so I got what I went for.
Now for the more critical section. First, I do not understand the complaint some of you have made that the movie was less intense than the first. I think this movie was far more intense, however it used intensity to replace substance. Now the first movie was quite substance free as well, but this one had nearly every character simply flailing around through a storyline that I frankly didn't care about. I wanted to see the robots fight, with some exposition between to link the scenes. Instead we recieved a pointlessly juvenile serving of college bullshit, roommate bullshit, love bullshit, hacker bullshit (worse than the first movies hacker bullshit, which at least got to fall back on the entertaining Anthony Anderson) and various other bits of bullshittery. About the only redeeming bits of plot in the movie were the character development between Starscream and Megatron. We finally got to see them as characters, which was quite great.
Really, despite having a fun time at the movie, my most major disappointment was that the movie manages to be less eloquent, more poorly scripted, and less believable than the 1985 Transformers movie, which was a cartoon with a planet eating robot! The animated film treated the audience in a much more mature fashion, with characters that learn and grow through the film and lines that are simply much more clever and telling of the personality of the bots than this film featured; TF2 has Optimus fate line, but the original had "Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost" a simple line referring to the cost to himself and showing his heroism later when he dies to stop megatron. We have Galvatron's quip of "Coronation, this is bad comedy" showing him as clever and antagonistic. Hell even Devastator sums himself up with a much better line in the animated "prepare for extermination" simple and too the point, like a 100 foot tall robot should be.
I think it is a damning criticism of a movie when the mid-eighties animated toy commercial of a movie is far more substantial in its 90 minutes than you can achieve in two hours plus. Now again, I really did enjoy watching this new transformers movie, because it fulfilled my expectations for its entertainment, however I will probably watch this move less than a dozen times for the rest of my life, which is less times than I have seen most of my favorite movies and cannot really compete with the 1000 or so times I have seen ghostbusters.
A teenage girl is just a teenage boy who can get laid.
-GTO
We're not just doing this for money; we're doing this for a shitload of money!
Oni Koneko Damien wrote:
I understand the movie needed some sort of relationship-plot to move things along, but this one was completely fucking idiotic and immature.
Teenagers doing something immature. How ridiculous!
Maybe I have too much faith in youth, but the 'romance' subplot was something I'd expect from late middle-school/early high-school preteens. I know fresh high school graduates aren't the most mature people in the world, but am I being unreasonable in expecting them to have the basic capacity to say "I love you" to, shock, someone they love?
To be fair, the fact that she turned out to be a Pretender (According to the novelization (and the TF Wiki), she took the form from an animatronic Alice In Wonderland robot, and thus her real name could very well be Alice) Decepticon doesn't actually excuse him kissing her before finding that out
That is to say, from what little she saw, she had no way of telling he was being raped or seduced.
But he didn't voluntarily kiss her. He resisted every advance she made and eventually she had to forcefully pin him to the bed and start kissing him without permission. And yes, I already admitted that when she first saw him she had every reason to be pissed, even if mistakenly so. But once she realizes the girl's a Decepticon, is she so damn stupid she's incapable of conceiving that *maybe* there's something more going on than him cheating on her?
Keep in mind earlier in the movie he was doing a damn good job of fending off Megatron, Starscream, and Grindor all by himself.
You mean aside from the fact that they killed him in that fight? Maybe I'm weird, but I call that a little less than a 'damn good job'. Yeah, he did manage to kill Grindor and damage Starscream, but they did still kill him in the end. I'd say that he wins hands down in a one-on-one battle against any, but from what's shown, he's not so far above everything else in skill level that it's certain to be an immediate curb-stomping.
Answering other points
Why does the Fallen somehow magically get the Matrix Key when it has to be earned? Remember, back when humans were tribal, the robots fought a war with each other to prevent him from using it to activate the sun-destroying thingie. Obviously he 'earned' it long ago and still has the capability to use it to this day.
Alternately, the fact that he was a Prime too meant that they couldn't deny it from him so easily/at all.
Or hell, maybe he actually made that key and/or that machine, or supervised the construction of both. He was the one that initially wanted to destroy the sun, probably already had done so for a number of other systems.
Gaian Paradigm: Because not all fantasy has to be childish crap. Ephemeral Pie: Because not all role-playing has to be shallow. My art: Because not all DA users are talentless emo twits. "Phant, quit abusing the He-Wench before he turns you into a caged bitch at a Ren Fair and lets the tourists toss half munched turkey legs at your backside." -Mr. Coffee
Clone Sergeant wrote:Perhaps they resurrected Blackout off screen and he was one of the signatures coming back up?
Apparently, that wasn't Blackout at all. His name was Grindor.
I recall reading something about that. Annoying. There were enough "clone" bots in the movie as it was. The extra Constructicons can be explained away as simple redunancy so an important weapon/tool/whatever isn't disabled by the loss of a component. But the rest were clearly just "meat" for the action sequences.
Oh well, the fight where Grindor meets his end, justified my ticket purchase anyway.
I just saw this movie today. I enjoyed the first Transformers movie a lot. However, I went into RotF expecting nothing, because of the absolutely wretched reviews it had been getting (currently 21% at RT). I'm like most normal people and don't always agree with the critics, who can be bandwagon haters or pretentiously artsy. However, they have shown that they can enjoy recent CGI-filled summer blockbusters, and they even gave the first movie mixed to slightly positive reviews (57%, just a little bit short of the super majority needed to qualify as "Fresh"). I use extremely negative RT scores as a red flag to prepare myself for potential bombs.
My personal review: Spoiler
After seeing the movie, I don't know why the critics are hating on this movie so much. I mean, they didn't even hate the last TF movie, but they were making bold statements such as RotF being the "worst movie of the year" or completely "incomprehensible." That's how you describe those total clusterfuck flops, not a movie which is merely another action-packed, "turn off your brain" crowd pleaser. RotF was nowhere near the trainwreck I had feared it might be.
It wasn't as good as the last movie, IMO. That one was also dumb summer fun, with its share of writing problems, but there was something basic and pure about it. I think Wong put it best when he described its story as the adventures of a young boy and his pet dragon. Anguirus also brought up a point I agreed with in this thread, which is that the first movie had a better sense of Spielburg-like wonder. I suppose that's because the Transformers were new and alien in that movie, and the Decepticons were portrayed as a mysterious, overpowering threat.
RotF has a more focused plot than the first movie, which had no less than three separate sets of characters who had very minimal interaction with each other (Sam, Sam's family, and Mikaela; that blonde DoD analyst Maggie and her fat geeky friend; Captain Lennox and his soldiers). In RotF, it's basically just Sam and Mikaela, whose actions provided direction for everyone else.
That said, RotF's plot was overall inferior to the first movie's. I already described how that movies plot had a basic appeal to it, and a sense of awe and mystery. It also had more likable side characters. The first movie showed Lennox as a new father, who was being separated from his family by the Decepticon invasion. It wasn't much, but it made the character more appealing than the blank slate he was in RotF. Maggie was irreverent but competent and brilliant, and her geeky friend was the funny butt to many of the movie's jokes.
In RotF, we get...Sam's douchebag roommate. God I hated that character. He was introduced as an arrogant ass, and a lot of his word choices and mannerisms in the dorm scene just bugged me. Later on he devolved into the wussy, whiny joke character who kept getting dumped on. It didn't work as well as the fat geek in the first movie, because the fat geek was unassuming, vulnerable, and enthusiastic in a dorky way, making him far more likable.
The blonde slut at Sam's college was also crap. I didn't find it believable at all that this gorgeous supermodel-like girl would just walk up to a guy like Shia LeBeouf, who she had just seen, and come on to him that strongly. Of course she later turned out to be a Decepticon, but that revelation came after she already had two scenes like that. A revelation that makes sense doesn't automatically dissolve the crappiness of previous scenes. Anyway, she was just another useless character that could have been cut from the film.
The ghetto Autobot Twins were annoying as well. They were blatantly the racial stereotypes that Jar Jar and the Neimoidians were accused of being.
The Fallen was just a bare and uninteresting villain, who didn't deserve to take Megatron's thunder or have the movie named after him. The guy's backstory amounted to "he hates humans" (and happened to be the leader of the Decepticons all this time even though nobody had heard of him). He never actually does anything. His first and last real battle in the movie was too brief and anticlimatic, ending in Optimus kicking his ass with ease. And what was that crap about how "only a Prime" can beat him. He gave no indication of being harder to kill than other Decepticons.
Some characters did work very well. Optimus got to be the asskicking badass he should have been in the first movie. John Turturro's Agent Simmons was portrayed as more heroic this time around, instead of just being a government asshole.
Sam and Mikaela's actions in the first half of the movie were RETARDED. Sam implausibly finds a shard of the All-Spark in the tattered jacket he had worn during the events of the first movie (clothing which he kept as a piece memorabilia and claimed to have checked out all the time), and the shard almost gets him killed by creating several new and evil Transformers. What does he do? Hand it over to Bumblebee? Call Optimus or any of the government contacts he must have gotten after the first film? His parents implied that the relationship is so close that they expected the governement to pay for all the damage to his house. No, he gives it to his freaking girlfriend for no discernible reason. Later, after Mikaela captures a tiny Decepticon trying to steal that shard, she doesn't turn it in either despite the fact that it represents a plot to kill her and destroy the world. No, she just packs it up and sneaks it onto an airplane herself (my ass that would have gotten through security, especially with the Decepticon making so much noise). Sam and Mikaela's arguing over relationship crap while running from the slutty Decepticon was also unbelievable.
The movie got a LOT better after the Decepticons came out in the open and launched their massive strike against humanity. The scenes of Sam sitting alone, feeling guilty as the Decepticons destroyed a supercarrier and killed thousands in several major cities, gave the movie a bit of gravity (although it wasn't followed up on, as the movie's tone switched back to action-comedy). From then on RotF became an archaeological quest movie. The history didn't really make sense, but the annoying characters and blatant plot stupidity were dialed down in the second half of the movie.
The final battle was war porn for the military buff in me, just like many of the battles in the first movie. It was great to see USAF F-16s and a B-1B bomber, Navy Hornets launching off the deck of a carrier, Army soldiers shouting "Hooah!" as they entered battle, and Marines landing on LCACs (even if they didn't get to do anything). The usage of all these military assets was a bit disappointing though. Why did Agent Simmons have to endanger his own life by climbing the crumbling pyramid in order to call in some Navy help? Why did the writers even feel the need to add that destroyer-mounted railgun? Its inclusion in the movie was just pointless and gratuitous. The railgun was used just once to shoot Devastator (also a disappointment) off of the pyramid, then never again even though another shot could have destroyed the Decepticons' device and ended the battle right there. Why weren't all the Navy and Air Force jets directed to bomb the pyramid? The most ridiculous part of the battle was when the F-22s decided to make close flybys of the pyramid (instead of bombing the shit out of it), flying directly into The Fallen's swirling clouds of debris. I realize that the military can't beat the Decepticons alone (because Optimus has to do it), but at least take the F-22s down in a believable manner. Give the Decepticons some SAMs or more fliers. Let The Fallen wipe them out from a distance, like he did to those tanks.
This wasn't a horrible movie. I give it a 6 or 6.5 out of 10, whereas the first movie got a 7.5 from me.
"They're not triangular, but they are more or less blade-shaped"- Thrawn McEwok on the shape of Bakura destroyers
"Lovely. It's known as impugning character regarding statement of professional qualifications' in the legal world"- Karen Traviss, crying libel because I said that no soldier she interviewed would claim that he can take on billion-to-one odds
"I've already laid out rules for this thread that we're not going to make these evidential demands"- Dark Moose on supporting your claims
LOS ANGELES - Harmless comic characters or racist robots?
The buzz over the summer blockbuster "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" only grew Wednesday as some said two jive-talking Chevy characters were racial caricatures.
Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They're forced to acknowledge that they can't read. One has a gold tooth.
As good guys, they fight alongside the Autobots and are intended to provide comic relief. But their traits raise the specter of stereotypes most notably seen when Jar Jar Binks, the clumsy, broken-English speaking alien from "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace," was criticized as a caricature.
One fan called the Transformers twins "Jar Jar Bots" in a blog post online.
Todd Herrold, who watched the movie in New York City, called the characters "outrageous."
"It's one thing when robot cars are racial stereotypes," he said, "but the movie also had a bucktoothed black guy who is briefly in one scene who's also a stereotype."
"They're like the fools," said 18-year-old Nicholas Govede, also of New York City. "The comic relief in a degrading way."
Not all fans were offended. Twin brothers Jason and William Garcia, 18, who saw the movie in Miami, said they related to the characters — not their illiteracy, but their bickering.
"They were hilarious," Jason said. "Every movie has their standout character, and I think they were the ones for this movie."
In Atlanta, Rico Lawson said people were reading too much into the characters. "It was actually funny," said Lawson, 25, who saw the movie with his girlfriend in Atlanta.
That was the aim, director Michael Bay said in an interview.
"It's done in fun," he said. "I don't know if it's stereotypes — they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it."
Bay said the twins' parts "were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with their characters."
Actor Reno Wilson, who is black, voices Mudflap. Tom Kenny, the white actor behind SpongeBob SquarePants, voices Skids.
Wilson said Wednesday that he never imagined viewers might consider the twins to be racial caricatures. When he took the role, he was told that the alien robots learned about human culture through the Web and that the twins were "wannabe gangster types."
"It's an alien who uploaded information from the Internet and put together the conglomeration and formed this cadence, way of speaking and body language that was accumulated over X amount of years of information and that's what came out," the 40-year-old actor said. "If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that."
It's not fair to assume the characters are black, he said.
"It could easily be a Transformer that uploaded Kevin Federline data," Wilson said. "They were just like posers to me."
Kenny did not respond to an interview request Wednesday.
"I purely did it for kids," the director said. "Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them."
Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman said they followed Bay's lead in creating the twins. Still, the characters aren't integral to the story, and when the action gets serious, they disappear entirely, notes Tasha Robinson, associate entertainment editor at The Onion.
"They don't really have any positive effect on the film," she said. "They only exist to talk in bad ebonics, beat each other up and talk about how stupid each other is."
Hollywood has a track record of using negative stereotypes of black characters for comic relief, said Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, who has not seen the "Transformers" sequel.
"There's a history of people getting laughs at the expense of African-Americans and African-American culture," Boyd said. "These images are not completely divorced from history even though it's a new movie and even though they're robots and not humans."
American cinema also has a tendency to deal with race indirectly, said Allyson Nadia Field, an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"There's a persistent dehumanization of African-Americans throughout Hollywood that displaces issues of race onto non-human entities," said Field, who also hasn't seen the film. "It's not about skin color or robot color. It's about how their actions and language are coded racially."
If these characters weren't animated and instead played by real black actors, "then you might have to admit that it's racist," Robinson said. "But stick it into a robot's mouth, and it's just a robot, it's OK."
But if they're alien robots, she continued, "why do they talk like bad black stereotypes?"
Bay brushes off any whiff of controversy.
"Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything," he said. "It's like is everything going to be melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes."
Some of the pther complaints I don't get.. for instance the one about the guy in the deli (who I'm not sure whether he's supposed to be black or arab) with the buck teeth.. I've heard of the buck teeth as a chinese stereotype but not as a black one. And the twins never say they're illiterate, just that they can't read ancient cybertronian (which none of the other autobots could read either).
Okay, I've avoided this thread and any review site like the plague until we got to see the movie. So here's what we thought.
The pacing was better. Transformers dragged at times waiting for something, anything to happen in that first half. In this one we started on a high note. The human characters were given a bit more more depth, though the scene with Sam's mom tripping should have been cut to make room for other things. Several of the new Transformers didn't get introduced, Sideswipe kills Sideways and neither get an intro. Demolishor didn't need one but it would have been nice. Arcee being all three of the cycle-bots would have been nice to cover.
Jetfire, most awesome geriatric robot ever. Snow loved him immediately.
Mudflap and Skids I could have done without, they just seemed stupid rather than funny. I've heard complaints they were racist portrayals, but I wasn't aware 'stoner' was a race. I have to work with guys like this and they come in white, black, mexican, and korean round here. Wheelie (who's only named in the novel and toyline) was more amusing if more immature humor. (that may be partially that I think his leg humping was just to mess with Sam not that he was seriously attracted to her leg.)
The fight scenes were better put together, the first movie tended to get to close to the action so it was hard to see.
I've heard complaints the movie was sexist, thought how escapes, not only me but my wife as well. (remember if you have to explain why its discriminatory or insulting to the target your likely seeing things that aren't there.)
I've heard complaints the movie was too long, in my opinion it wasn't long enough, some of it seemed a little rushed.
As to the plot, well its a little simplistic and that seems to be a stumbling point for a lot of critics. Its so simple their tripping over themselves looking for complexity.
"Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything. " Argument against god's perfection.
Wanna-be gangsters who learned tough-guy slang from the Internet. Exactly as I've said.
Mayabird is my girlfriend
Justice League:BotM:MM:SDnet City Watch:Cybertron's Finest "Well then, science is bullshit. "
-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
Death from the Sea wrote:
I would like to know why every time the cube energy makes a new transformer they are evil and start trying to kill people.
If you remember back to the first movie it was clearly explained that in that universe all of earths integrated circuit technology was reverse engineered from studying Megatron. Thus they all obviously turn into Decepticons when you give them sentience, because all of their components were based on Decepticon derived technology to begin with.
Btw while I agree with many that the pacing of the movie definitively could have been better, it's worth noting that the final script was essentially a last minute hack job that they rushed together before the writers strike started. (and then, the master of deep storytelling, Michael Bay got to edit it for several months without any input from actual writers...)
Just imagine what it it could have been if they had gotten the time to fully hash out the script properly
As for Optimus beating the Fallen's ass and holding off Megatron and ruining Grindout's shit and disamputating Starscream's arm, we gotta remember that for the last two years, Optimus has been running around Earth getting air-dropped in covert black ops where he spends all his time uttering pre- intra- and post-mortem one-liners while he kills the fuck out of Decepticon shit, man. In that same time, Megatron spent it all being totally dead in the ocean. And shit, even with Allspark hoo-hah, he was still missing body parts and had to get robot surgery with replacement spare parts from some other Decepticon who got turned into spare parts. While when Optimus came back, he wasn't missing any limbs and he didn't just get any shitpiece's parts, but got parts from goddamn Jetfire - who not only had scramjets or shit, but also personal teleporters and shit!
Shroom Man 777 wrote:I just came back from watching TRANSFORMERS 2: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN and if there's one thing I can say, then it's:
OPTIMUUUUUSSSSS!!!!
God-damn! That should've been the movie's title - goddamn it! Because, Jesus Christ, that was what this movie was all about - it takes everything from the first movie and puts in more! Making it so much more HUEGER! It was great, it was awesome, it was SO AWESOME!
OPTIMUS PRIME RUINS EVERYONE'S SHIT! Holy crap!
I mean, the action - goddamn, it has TEN MORE AKSHUNS in it than TF2007, which is great! It has the conventional MURRICAN MILITARY kicking so MUCH ASS in the final act, with everything being thrown in, no holds barred! Goddamn F-16s, F-18s, Cobras and Apaches, goddamn hovercraft carrying M1 Abrams and Bradleys, and AIRDROPPED AUTOBOTS! And motherfucking ARCLIGHT strikes by B-1 LANCERS and close artillery support by MLRS and danger-close fire missions by goddamn experimental US NAVY RAILGUNS! OH MAN!
Seriously, NO HOLDS BARRED! Woah, what the goddamn fuck man! We have BUMBLEBEE RIPPING THE SPINE OUT OF MECHANICAL ATTACK TIGERS. OPTIMUS PRIME RIPS A DECEPTICON'S FACE INTO TWO! Man, oh man! SO MANY DECEPTICONS! THE WORLD IS DOOMED!
SO MUCH AKSHUN, AWESOME!
I'd say that the amount of weird-ass Bayhumor stays roughly equivalent to TF2007, and instead of a major pointless plot divergence with Australian-accent hacker chicks and fat black men, none of that sort happens. Though there is still the weirdisms and ROBOTIC BODILY FLUIDS. But unlike TF2007 where that stuff was rather prevalent in the first movie, REVENGE OF THE FALLEN drowns all that potentially allergenic stuff (for those who really can't stand the stuff, at least) with SO MUCH EXPLOSIONS!
DECEPTICONS INSINUATING THEMSELVES ON SPY SATELLITES AND BEING NIGH-OMNISCIENT EYES IN THE SKY!
OPTIMUS PRIME uttering PRE-MORTEM ONE LINERS before RUINING SO MUCH SHIT!
Man.
Goddamn.
I must watch it all again to create a vaguely coherent review.
"DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source) shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN! Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
Just saw it last night. I understand the comments about how the Decepticons were shite and spent their dime getting beaten up, but I liked the idea of the joint human/Autobot search and destroy missions. Even though the thought of them covering up a fight between an artic and a huge unicycle in the middle of Shangai is ridiculous. And they even had some token Englishmen to stand at the back and say "yessir" and "Incomi-aargh!"
Are there any pics of Arcee and the other members of the Autobot Motorcycle Display Team on the internet; I could never make out what they looked like - it seemed to me that they had one leg with a wheel on the end, rather than the 'normal' feet. Cool if so.
"So you want to live on a planet?"
"No. I think I'd find it a bit small and wierd."
"Aren't they dangerous? Don't they get hit by stuff?"
andrewgpaul wrote:
Are there any pics of Arcee and the other members of the Autobot Motorcycle Display Team on the internet; I could never make out what they looked like - it seemed to me that they had one leg with a wheel on the end, rather than the 'normal' feet. Cool if so.
All of the three bikes were supposed to combine to form Arcees robot form, presumably to get around the mass difference between cars and bikes, but Michael Bay disliked them so he toned down their role. (in fact he disliked them enough to kill them off. Just because)
It's pretty obvious that they were supposed to be part of a gestalt. If Chromia was not supposed to be the left leg/arm of the completed form I'll eat my hat.
Also here is Arcee:
And finally purple bikebot which I never managed to learn the name of:
Actually, they're cooler, IMO, than if they combined. And Word Of God says she/they died? Bah. I'm choosing to ignore that. OK, she took a shot to the face in the final battle, but so did plenty of the Transformers. In the absence of actual dismemberment, I'm choosing to believe she survived (and possibly ended up as Mikaela's bike, but that's not really important).
"So you want to live on a planet?"
"No. I think I'd find it a bit small and wierd."
"Aren't they dangerous? Don't they get hit by stuff?"
"
