OH.
MY.
GOD!!!
This movie kicks so much ass that it should never stop showing in theaters. They're going to have to reserve one part of the megaplex just to keep showing this movie, over and over, every night for the next 20 years. When I walked out of the theater I felt like I had run a marathon, and I wanted to smoke a cigarette. It was that good!
When I first walked in, I heard a voice call my name. It was my friend from the Sheriff's Posse with a group of people. Too bad there was nowhere to sit near him, but he probably would have talked through the movie so maybe it was better. I got in there half an hour before the start and the place was already packed. Everyone was saving all the good seats, so I sat on the left side aisle right up front. I've never tried that, but I'll do it again, because the view was awesome and so was the sound.
We've all seen the jerky 80s G1 animation, and the smooth CGI cartoons of BW and BM, and the anime stylings of the later Japanese shows, but this was really something special. To see an actual vehicle tranform into a robot, but not in a cartoony fashion and not using any kind of animation, is an experience no one has seen until now. Oh, there are a couple of clips out there of the Nike shoe jumping down from the billboard, and the yellow VW beetle transforming into an Autobot with a sword and shield, but even those are very simple transformations compared to what happens in this movie. There's one clip that we've all seen on TV as a preview, where Sam and Mikaela are standing in the street and Optimus rolls up and starts to transform from truck to robot. Well, that was the first time they showed him transforming, and they spent some time showing the details of it from several angles, and when it was over, the crowd went wild, cheering and clapping. If you had an Optimus toy that transformed this way, it would take you 30 minutes to move all the pieces around even if you were looking at the diagram. But the way the movie shows it, it just makes sense that an actual transformation would have to be that complicated to move all the mechanical pieces around and into position to make a vehicle into a robot. And they do transform a lot. Starscream particularly goes back and forth from robot to jet, for reasons unknown, but it's worth watching. There's one sequence that's shown as a teaser trailer where he flies under a bridge, transforms, grabs the bridge, and flips up over it to land in robot mode. It's amazing to watch, but you realize that they would all be able to do that at a moment's notice because it comes naturally to them.
Seeing it in the movie theater is an unforgettable experience, but of course it has its down side, since people are talking and making noise just when you want to hear what's happening. But to see this on the big wide screen in all its glory is really something special, and I'll spend money to go see it again. There were a few times when the audience laughed at something I didn't hear because people were still laughing at a previous joke, and Bumblebee wasn't too easy to understand during the first part of the movie. Also, during some of the fight sequences it was hard to tell who was fighting against whom because of all the dust and debris flying around. But it's realistic-looking and very impressive.
I bought my ticket online, and the description says "(PG-13), for intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, brief sexual humor, and language." I thought the "brief sexual humor" was totally unnecessary and it made the movie something that a parent might not want to take a youngster to see. Maybe kids are more mature these days but in my opinion it didn't add anything to the movie. But what I liked about the violence was that all the Transformers had GUNS and they shot them frequently and with good effect, as did all of the military guys on the ground and the planes in the air. Guns are what you use to fight against the bad guys, and the recent trend toward having Transformers use melee fighting or beam weapons or whatever doesn't make any kind of sense at all. So I was happy to see the return to the 1980s roots.
There are one or two things in this movie that don't show up in the Transformers mythos from previous TF series. I'm sure the "purists" and critics will whine and cry about how this movie "destroys" the show, or how they don't consider it part of Transformers but an alternate reality altogether. Well those guys will always be out there and they can write whatever they want, but this Transfan liked the movie a lot and is going to pay money to go see it again. Check the iMDB entry and see all the happy movie viewers, and then consider whether the critics who didn't like it are far out of the mainstream.
Go see this movie. You won't be disappointed.







