robot on robot action? OH YEAH!

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2007)

I went into this movie with expectations restrained. The trailers kicked @ss, but then again thats the purpose of trailers, right? They're little bundles of lies that leads us to believe a movie will rock the sh*t, whether they do or not we soon discover once we sit through the features themselves. Fortunately no lies were involved here, and, if anything, the movie itself tore the trailer to bits and p*ssed on each shard one fragment at a time.
It was an arresting experience, sitting in awe, watching this movie roll by one frame at a time. I was just engrossed. It was one of those instances where you're so overwhelmingly entertained that you begin to forget you're sitting in a cinema full of people; you're by yourself in your own mind, you're locked-in, and your existing for every moment of the film that passes by. I know that in itself seem like a very powerful statement to make, I mean, it's not like this film bears the same kind of emotional integrity as say Schindler's List or Hotel Rwanda, but that doesn't make it any less an experience to savour. It has the kind of energy and enthusiasm that we all embodied as tiny children when we were crunching our Transformer figures together on our bedroom floors; occasionally integrating a Ninja Turtle, or a Ghostbuster just to broaden the fantasy in our tiny minds.
If you go into this film as a critic, you'll be doing yourself a disservice. This film demands that you volunteer your senses. That you don't sit there in analytical mode; questioning why every ounce of the film is happening the way it's happening and why. You can do that with all the Bergmann, Lynch, and Ozu films you want to when you get home. And if you simply insist on doing that then you've chosen the wrong film. Transformers is an artifact; an anonymous exhibit in a museum with no factoid printed below it. You don't need to know how or why it got here, you just need to look and admire.