Pull the plug on this pathetic, pretentious hunk of junk.

Rating: 1/10 (26 June 2009)

This movie is so awful, so devoid of anything that even remotely resembles a work of art that one can reasonably conclude that the director was instructed to sacrifice any vestige of artistic quality in order to make a quick buck. There can be no other credible explanation for why this weird cartoon/live action concoction was made in the first place. The producers of this movie must have gotten together and decided that they will make a movie suitable for a four-year-old but advertise it as a PG-13 movie and thus sucker in adults to watch this incredible cinematic mess. In fact, this film is so bad that no child should be made to have to watch this cacophony of noise. There are enough problems in this world that we do not need to add a movie that shows machines behaving like people and so-on-and-so-forth.
Sometimes a movie is bad because of poor directing, sometimes because of poor acting, sometimes because of a poor script, sometimes because of poor cinematography and sometimes because of other creative factor. This movie combines the worst features of all the categories mentioned. This movie, which is part cartoon and part live action, seems determined to delete or play down anything that even remotely resembles a coherent and intellectually stimulating plot. The fundamentally infantile plot is overshadowed only by the gratuitous use of special effects that are so cartoon-like that it makes one wonder why this movie even bothered to use actors at all. But what ultimately destroys this movie as a quality work of art is a ponderous, pedestrian, witless and implausible plot that asks the audience to root for or at least care about machines, big, noisy, ugly, clanking, machines, which is definitely stretching literary license to the limit. A machine is ... a machine and to invest it with human qualities is an untenable concept that is bound to destroy the plausibility of any story and this movie is no exception. This would be like having the USS Enterprise become one of the characters in Star Trek or a tank or aircraft carrier having something to say in a war movie. But that is what this movie asks the audience to accept, and it does not work because it cannot work. Machines fighting ... settling grudges ... discussing issues of good vs. bad ... ugh! Now, the movie does make an intriguing attempt to mimic the opening scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey, but quickly slides back to a level of intellectual sophistication appropriate for a child - a very young, preliterate child. It is as if the director had no confidence in the screenwriter or lost confidence in the power of cinema to actually tell a literate story, and instead opted to fill the movie with ridiculous special effects a la the recent remake of King Kong with its plethora of incredibly hysterical special effects that reduced THAT movie to the level of a cinematic joke. Indeed, this movie might have worked better if King Kong HAD made a cameo appearance and duked it out with one of the bad guy machines. King Kong vs. The Machines. But that's another story. This movie is so devoid of intellectual content that it makes one of Michael Bay's other movies, Pearl Harbor, seem like a first-class production of Shakespeare. Enough already. Just pull the plug on this noisy, pretentious, ludicrous, inane, boring, and decidedly obtuse clunker. Or better yet, just take it out of circulation and stick it in the junk yard with all the other rusting and worthless pieces of junk.