About half way through this movie, I thought to myself, This is one frikken excellent movie! And at that point, it was. There was character building, especially with BumbleBee, a Transformer who was at the time only in his car mode. He talked through the radio and acted of his own volition.
There was also bursts of action with real sense of danger. I had high hopes for the rest of the film. Then I remembered something.
I loved the first half of The Island too.
I'm happy to say that the second half of this movie held up better than the second half of that one. Sure, there are characters doing stuff with their motivations not clearly defined. And perhaps too much humor applied to scenes that didn't need it. And wordy hunks of exposition inserted to move the plot along. But all in all, some of Michael Bay's bag of tricks were more at home here than in the Island.
Especially his use of slow motion. He used it a lot in the battle scenes. When in most movies, CGI scenes are done fast and at night in order to hide the flaws of the process, Bay has his robots leap over an innocent human in broad daylight in slow motion.
The action is exciting and even though there is a similarity to all of the robots, you can easily tell them apart. The acting was good. Shia LeBoeuf is probablly going to be around for a long time. Megan Fox does prove that God does sometimes name people, although she appears to be at least 10 years older that Shia in this movie.
It's not the best film in the world, or even the best action film in the world, but it's a good movie that holds together in the end.
Now, the trailers:
- The Gameplan: The "Rock in a cutesy family comedy movie" movie. It seems fomulaic. But one of the Rock's best qualities with his wrestling mike work was his humor and comedic timing. So it could work.
- Balls of Fury: This has been advertised for months. What's taking so long? I mean, I doubt the premise is going to get any better if it wait a while before it's released.
- Hot Rod: I accidentally wrote this down as Superbad. I was totally confused because I'm sure that that wasn't the trailer I saw. Anyway, take that as a potentially bad sign. It does look like it has the potential to be funny. And it co-stars Isla Fisher, which is most definitely a good thing.
- Invasion: It's weird when you have two movies in a year costarring the same people. Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig star in this one and The Golden Compass. This is yet another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but that is not a bad thing. The theme of that movie is so timeless that you can count on a remake every 20 years and it will still seem fresh every time.
- Untitled J.J. Abrams Project (or 01-18-08): This is the trailer that set the internet abuzz. It starts out at a going away party for a man leaving for Japan. It's shot on a hand-held video camera, very shaky and grainy. You get the idea that this is going to be a coming of age film dealing with a lot of serious relationships. Then explosions start happening. The guests at the party go to the roof, and see flames coming from downtown NYC. They go to the street and look down toward the flames. Suddenly a projectile shoots out of the blaze, richochets of a skyscraper and lands in the street a few feet infront of the party goers. It's the Statue of Liberty's head. I have to say, at that moment, I was kinda hooked. I'm not a big fan of J.J. Abrams (That Superman script he did was pretty horrid), but this movie has potential. My opinion is that horror is always better when you are not sure what it is that you are afraid of.
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