Ebert liked the original, gave it a mildly positive review. Can’t say the same for the second:
If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
I liked the first. Thought the beginning was well played, the middle sucked the life out of it, but the finish was alright, though it took me three viewings to figure out eveything going on. Watching Optimus Prime appear to the save the day after his highway fight always puts a grin on my face.
Bay was smart enough to use Peter Cullen, who did Prime’s original voice in the cartoon. Cullen gave the character spirit. The cartoon was B-grade kiddie schleck no child would sit through today, it resonated because of the characters and the overall heart. There wasn’t government conspiracies to hide or kidnap transformers, the good guys did what they were supposed to do – get along and work together.
At the center was Prime, who became a type of John Wayne figure to children of the 80s, Sci-Fi and animation fans. Never a hypocrite, always bold and father-like, to introduce a head protagonist today that seems more like a kindly father figure than some skateboarding, cliche-spouting punk would be marketing suicide. But it worked wonders in 1984. Prime was three-dimensional, charismatic. A big dependable soul in a big dependable semi-truck. He was Dad for a generation without one. A National Guardsman legally changed his name to “Optimus Prime,” citing his lack of a father growing up and how the cartoon affected him.
Granted, a talking truck doesn’t sound like much of a deep character, but this is the same town that can make a CGI golden retriever the most lovable character of the year and create Gollum. Why so few blockbusters attempt to go beyond skin deep is a travesty.
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I was going to see it, but this movie has gotten such godawful reviews down the line that I cannot grace it with my finances.
…and then they killed Prime off in the first ten minutes of “Transformers: The Movie,” reducing a generation of children to tears, and more or less trashing the franchise. The next season of the show was set in the then-future-year of 2006, and continued primeless, and featured a few minor crossovers with GI Joe. (Cobra Commander in one, we get a breif glimpse of Flint in another, and the chick who was assigned to them by the government was Flint and Lady Jaye’s daughter) It never recovered.
Likewise, GI Joe: The Movie that same year killed off Duke (Or tried to), which makes one wonder what kind of love/hate relationship the studio had with their own shows.
THEY KILLED OF PRIME?!?!
The bastards.
Yes, part of the most cynical marketing ploy in history. “Lets kill off the old toys, make new ones, and the kids will buy the new ones. Forget all our endearing characters.” Quite the catastrophe. The show last one more season. They brought back Prime in the final episodes, when Hasbro realized what a huge mistake it had made, but by then it was too late.
Out of all the reviews so far, my favorite quote comes from James Berardinelli: “The robots are all back: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, Megan Fox.”
That was a pretty brutal review from Ebert, but my all-time favorite diss was his review of “Freddy Got Fingered”.
Behold:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010420/REVIEWS/104200304/1023
^ “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
Well put!
I went and checked it out last night on IMAX which frankly was a bit overwhelming but so long as you check your brain at the door this movie is good escapism. Don’t go in there expecting Shawshank Redemption.
Strangely my biggest problem with the movie was the over sexed up Megan Fox. It honestly just felt like she was trying to hard to be sexy and it felt forced and contrived, sort of like watching Marilyn Monroe sing happy brithday to JFK for 2 and a half hours. Not to mention her lips looked like they had an inner tube in them. Other issues; you still can’t tell what the hell is going on during the fight scenes. There were two really aggravating Transformers named Mudflap and Skids who you just wished would die. As bad as they were they were still not near the Jar Jar Binks Hall of Shame.
One thing I was super, terrific happy about (I’m saying it that way in honor of the Transformers Japanese origins) is Prime was awesome. He was a robotic John Wayne; honorable, strong willed, uncomprimising, and merciless to his enemies. Another positive was there were some definite digs at Obama’s policies on fighting the war on terror, this is part of what has turned off a lot of critics I think, and the whole movie just had this America F**k Yeah feel about it that I loved.