Transformers 2 Teaser Online!

jerseycajun says:

Rob,

The way I see it, a good judge of whether or not they’ve done a good job developing characters in a movie is if the screen time they’ve been given feels “right”. We both agree the transformers needed a lot more in that department, and I would argue that it stems from a severe lack of said development.

What you’re describing to me of the characters in the film is not so much character development as it is caricature and stereotype. Their behavior when they ’sacrifice’ stems not from their character and internal fortitude, but because that’s how the screenwriters perceived that the universal ‘hero’ should act.

Like I said, I’m glad you found it to be more engrossing than I did, because that means at least one of us got our money’s worth.

As for Independence Day, that’s about a 3/10 – it at least had action scenes which could be followed technically.

Terminator 3, I’d give about a 6 or 7 because the dialog was at least serviceable and the actors (except for Arnie for the first time in this series, strangely enough – but that may be due to the writers, I’m thinking) pulled off their characters believably. That’s in addition to the action scenes were well put together and solid, if not terribly original.

Transformers couldn’t even put together an action scene where the movement was coherent. Even in the trailer for “ROTF” (all it needs is an “L”, right?) the movement was in so many different directions at once, the eye can’t focus on what’s going on, and this plagued the action scenes in the first film as well. That’s in addition to the scenes being shot too up close to huge robots, and editing that made it all but impossible to place where each character was in relationship to the others. In other words, it was chaos when scenes like this at their best only fool you into believing chaos is going on, but in reality the shots (when done right) are very well planned to give off that illusion while keeping the audience up to speed on relative location subconsciously.

I will say that ILM did their job in bringing realism to the robots, and maybe I’ll spot the film an extra half-point for that, but their work was largely thrown away by every other technical aspect of the film which detracted from it.

So, it didn’t bring the goods for me technically, emotionally (certainly not intellectually, but I never expected that), with humor (Turturo, Voight and the script made sure of that), or in any other way that matters when watching films in general – for me. There you have it.

Ken J says:

lol jb, now I have to look up EE Cummings and read some of his/her poems…

seven says:

The big wheel is NOT devastator…and it is not ONE part of devastator. People are saying that this is the excavator (devastators right arm)…..r u kidding me???…it had two big wheels!!!….the excavator does not have wheels it has tracks!!!…unreal!!