NEWS: Chris Gore's Footage Fetishes: Transformers' Formula for Success

Personally, i occasionally enjoy setting aside my knowledge of film and art and my personal pretentiousness and, you know, most of my brain... and WATCHING A MOVIE WHERE SHIT BLOWS UP AND GIANT ROBOTS FIGHT OMG OMG SO FUCKING RAD.

Transformers satisfied my need to see giant robots fight and explosions happen. Film lovers can go see something else.

i LOVED this movie!
i can't wait for part two!

i love robots so so much!
and shia lebeouf... ...yum!

Now that is a great point!

Independent films have become just as formulaic and cliché as their Hollywood counterparts. Thanks for the suggestion and I'll take you up on it for a future piece. Thanks reprobate!

Also, I did address this quite a bit in a film I co-wrote and produced which spoofs indies.

first off, i hated this movie.

i own the criterion edition of armegedon. i also own bad boys and the rock. i enjoy michael bay, the dude knows action flicks.

to this day, i defend movies like the entire matrix trilogy, and the star wars prequels. i love them, i think they are awesome.

transformers sucked hard. why? because when people make movies like this, they add too many humans. it's dumb. i thought john turtoro knew how to read a script, based upon his work with the coens, et al. apparently, he doesnt.

and why was anthony anderson in this movie? hmm...comic relief. he wasn't even that funny.

this is a nerd movie. am i a fanboy from the original series, yes, and michael bay, excuse me fore remembering the storyline. it was basically a tv show where robots fought, with LASERS. why did they have bullets?

why were the humans fighting too, they are ants compared to these alien forms. and how the heck does megatron get frozen. what is that. its stupid is what it is.

this movie could have been awesome. i could have overlooked the redesigns, the changes in the mythology, but i can't overlook two things. the amount of crappy humans in the movie, and the really bad dialogue. "your more then meets the eye", i woulda flunked out of film school for writing that. yay, that was worth the writers, what, 250,000 dollar salary

let's not forget john voight shooting at a transformer with a SHOTGUN in a CASE that RANDOMLY appears, and let's not forget that crappy slow motion shot of a an LA WAIF HOT CHICK as a transformer goes flyin overhead. what was that crap, it was crap, millions of dollars of crap.

jeez, for what this movie cost we could all have universal health care for a few years. movie industry, do that, instead of making a sequel to transformers, piss off our government for a few years, and give us healthcare, that would be amazing.

I think it would be difficult to base an entire movie around robots. As humans we relate to humans and a whole movie with robots talking might as well be a cartoon or CGI movie. Perhaps the sequel will expand on making the various Transformers have more distinct personalities, but this first movie worked for me BECAUSE I cared about the human characters, so I didn't mind.

He was a crowd pleaser and worked to break that end-of-the-world depressing military stuff.

I don't think you can make a movie on this scale only for nerds, like us. It must have mass appeal. The bullets/laser thing is nit-picking like the flames on OP.

Again, to make us care. Acting is for the most part, in the eyes. It's hard to relate to 30 foot tall robots with steel eyes.

Oh, it was fun. And a nod to the cartoon, which I thought was well respected throughout, especially with the camaro/Bumble Bee hitting the VW bug in the beginning.

Overall, you have to forget the original a bit and understand the medium's are different. I expect there will be more Tranformers movies/direct-to-DVD releases and toys to come.

I doubt you'd listen to someone who expressed the same opinion in a thread about The Insane Clown Posse or some other terrible music.

Evidently thankfully so.

Such an odd thing to say when you think about the fact that the planet Earth is populated with, you got it..... humans.

Ah, Shalome is so sensible.
Pure escapism - you don't go to T'formers to think.
Shooting things, exploding things and hot, fast things (and thats the just the girls).