Noise, destruction and nonsense. Bay strikes again.

Rating: 1/10 (20 June 2009)

I honestly went into this movie expecting to be entertained. i thought that would be a reasonable expectation. i wasn't expecting to be moved, i wasn't expecting to be stimulated intellectually, i didn't expect the movie to stay with me for days after seeing it...but congratulations are in order for the Bay-Meister couldn't even keep me interested in the action scenes.
So lets get the positives out of the way first. the movie IS stunning to look at, every frame is polished to a chromed shine. CGI is wonderful, and the robots are pretty cool in their design. so that element of the film gets a 3 out of 10.
oh boy, now the negatives. lets start with the humans. Shia: i don't know if his "jumpy geeky nervousness" is supposed to be endearing but i just found it very annoying. Megan brings nothing more to the film than eye candy (although that is some DAMN tasty candy). john turturro, one of my favorite actors, reduced to hamming it up so awfully i expected him to blurt out 'bud-eep bud-eep, thats all folks" at the end. john voight, ah how the mighty joe buck has fallen, just a run of the mill 'government-guy' performance. the rest of the actors, milquetoast would be a compliment to their performances. some roles are just so perfunctory and purposeless(the worlds greatest hacker happens to be a smoking hot little blonde Aussie chick. yuh-huh. and her role brings nothing to the film except to develop the very bare bones story, which is so riddled with plot holes and nonsense i could do a thesis on it). the transformers: not much personality is injected into these cgi creations, other than some woeful and weird stereotypes (jazz, although hailing from another planet is now acting like a Harlem pimp. riiiiiiight).
so the humans and robots acting is atrocious. and the fact that the dialogue given is just so cliché-riddled and uninspiring sure doesn't help either. i cant decide whats more tiring to sit through with this film...the horrible acting and dialogue and story or the action scenes. so lets move onto the action anyway, which is just sound and fury, a mess of flashing images of destruction and cacophonous sound that leave everyone but the 12-18 yr old male demographic numb. Bay cant do an action scene. he specializes in them, yet this doesn't mean he is competent at doing them. a well staged action scene is not shaky cameras, quick cuts, deafening noise and wanton destruction. but this is the calling card of transformers...the worst thing is that when the robots do fight, most of them look relatively similar, so when they do collide, its just a big ball of machinery rolling around. and that fight in the city at the end, the film really seems to gloss over the fact that half the god damn city is destroyed, buildings demolished, hundreds of cars thrown about like marbles...how many thousand people would have perished amidst all this carnage??? just glossed over like its completely irrelevant, as long as megatron was destroyed everything else is inconsequential....
OK, I've wasted enough time writing about this film, its a complete load of tripe that ill forget about in 30 minutes from now. its just so frustrating that in this day and age we are privileged to experience great character driven action movies (Iron man, The Dark Knight etc) we still get Michael Bay's crap-tacular Transformers.