Earth at Aphelion
Take Your Webmaster to Lunch Day
Birthday - President George W. Bush (43rd President)
Day of Statehood (Lithuania)
Independence Day (Comoros)
Republic Day (Malawi)
So my brother and sister remain firmly convinced that we can all just cancel Hollywood and go home, because after the pinnacle that was Transformers it can only go downhill.
I gotta admit, it was pretty cool. Out of all the many comic/cartoon geek nostalgia movies being marketed, this is the one that most closely keeps that weirdly light and goofy feel of the original cartoons, which were basically commercials for toys you could change from robots to trucks* and thus have two cool toys in one.
But like all these movies, there’s are certain conditions to my suspension of disbelief, and I finally figured out what it is—the stuff is supposed to be set in a world like ours, so we identify with it. That must remain constant. The variables are the things with the superpowers, which are from another world and thus they can add new information. Which is why you get the following:
Stuff I Could Accept:
-Earth finds itself hosting a war between two factions of giant robotic life forms FROM SPACE with names like “Bumblebee” and “Starscream” and “Decepticons,” who want a magic cube that has the power to give life to machines, and even in this epic battle the good robots are human enough to try to help the kid they’re guarding get the girl and to be a little sheepish when they trash somebody’s rosebushes.**
Things I Couldn’t Accept:
-The periodic bits where somebody would fall 20 stories or so and one of the Autobots would quickly catch him before he hit the ground, saving him from impact. It doesn’t matter if you hit the ground or a giant metal hand a few feet above the ground. The impact will be the same—it might even be worse, if the hand caused an uneven hit or was moving upward at the time. Maybe if they had shock-absorber padding on their hands or something, but they didn’t. And they just kept putting that in, and I’d wince every time.
-Remember the law of conservation of mass? Shrink a giant power cube to the size of a football and it shouldn’t suddenly have the mass of a football. Similarly, shrink a massive robot into a truck and it still won’t weigh the same as a truck.
Though I will note that its being such a consistent error makes it easier to assume that maybe these robots have some limited control of mass, or can negate gravity to a certain extent, or something.
-So you say that a power cube has turned your toaster into a malicious sentient robot? Fine. But unless the manufacturer planned for this contingency and was on the side of the robots, I doubt very much that the toaster contains powerful tentacles, tiny machine guns, and camera-shutter eyes, all of which are meant to sprout at a moment such as this. Its destructive capabilities are pretty much limited to burning your toast to a lump of carbon. Honestly, where do suddenly-evil household appliances get these components?
Minor nitpicks, really, to a movie that rivals Pirates in both stupid and AWESOME—and completely blows it away in terms of explosions. And I have to admit, when that red and blue truck drove up to the kids for the Big Entrance!, I realized that I was eight years old again, and that I was in for one kickass ride.
*Unless you had my motor skills, at which point you would transform them into some sort of half-formed homunculus with its head on backwards. And you were always losing Optimus Prime’s hands.
**And a million points to Peter Cullen for his ad libs as Prime, which single-handedly rescued the movie from being SRS EPIC BATTLE by keeping the Autobots as the well-meaning cream puffs they were in the show when they weren’t accidentally destroying cities. One of the best things about the movie was that Optimus Prime was freaking adorable.
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