Maybe I’m getting to be more discerning. Maybe I’m just getting fed up with the Star-Wars-Effect: big budget, bad script, good action sequences, average result. Perhaps movies are just sucking more these days.
We saw Transformers the other day. Now I used to be a fan - I had an Optimus Prime toy as a kid (and a bunch of others). Transformers were really, really cool. The movie, however, was awful.
It set me up to be bad. Very early on in the movie the Defence Secretary was talking to a roomful of ’signal analysis experts’. Oh-oh. That’s what I am. That’s my field.
Whenever movies delve into anything that I happen to have some level of expertise in it’s bad news, since they invariably get it wrong, distort the possibilities, and just generally make a bit of a hash of it. Computer interfaces, for example - who has a desktop like that? Take Enemy of the State for example: US satellite cameras apparently have infinite resolution, as they can keep zooming in indefinitely. And wall-mounted surveillance cameras can move around a room to look at the other side of a person. What possibilities! Such technology! (Incidentally, this is why I really dislike Dan Brown - the two areas he writes his page-turners on are religion and science, specifically Christianity and technology. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he gets it wrong.)
Luckily, apart from a stupid line about the government needing to move their signal analysis from ‘Fourier transfers to quantum calculation’, there was little cringe-worthy techno-fiction. What was cringe-worthy was the dialogue. There were a number of set pieces where characters would discuss what they already knew to be true, in order to inform the audience. For example, a group of transformers at one stage talked about their collective history, for no other reason than to inform the audience. Scriptwriters - find another way of communicating that information! People don’t talk like that, informing their colleagues of what they already know as basic truths. It’s entirely unnatural and very contrived.
I think my basic problem is that I don’t like to be treated like an idiot as an audience member. I don’t need big signposts pointing to who the good guys and the bad guys are (for transformers it’s easy - blue eyes good, red eyes bad). It was laid on pretty thick in places - the bad secret service agents all drove up in big black cars, so that you knew they were bad. At one point, if you hadn’t yet been convinced that the main baddie-transformer Megatron was truly what he appeared to be, he transformed into a plane and flew through a multi-storey tower-like building. He flew through a building! Unbelievable.
The action sequences and CGI were, however, nothing short of astounding. The transformer models were incredible, and watching them go from car/truck/helicopter/etc. to giant robot was very nifty indeed. That’s why it’s such a shame that the dialogue and bad editing let it down. Long slapstick scenes could have (and should have) been cut, if only to make way for the action. That’s why we’re seeing it after all.
After all of that, here’s one light note about the movie to finish on: I read a great little article recently about the guys who did all the computer graphics work for the film. The production company offered to send down model samples so the designers could work their magic, but being the massive computer geeks they were they declined the offer - between them they had all of the transformer toys from childhood. Nice.
 
