Transformers: Whatever The Hell The Rest Of The Title Is.

A number of errors led me to see this film today. The cinema's website claimed
that Looking For Eric was on at 2pm. This was the first error. When I got to
the cinema, I quickly bought a ticket from the machine, not noticing it was a
ticket for a Monday showing. That was the second error. The girl in the cinema
tore the ticket and sent me to the screen indicated without realising it was
the wrong day. That was the next error. When I got into the cinema, I was
presented with Hanna Montana: The Movie, so I left, and traded the ticket in
for a later showing of Transformers. This may also have been an error.

There's nothing to like about this movie. The humans in the movie are uniformly
badly written, badly acted and completely without redeeming interest. Whenever
something with pulse is on the screen, that moment is a waste of your time.

But so what, right? It's giant robot explodo movie. But I've got so many
issues with that aspect too. First, design. When we were kids, Transformers
were cooler if the robot in question looked like cool robots built out of cars
when they were robots. The robots in transformers have this appalling busy
design, they just don't look good, they look messy. Second, action. Michael Bay
seems to think that all he needs to do to make robot fights cool is to just
slap tons of motion blur on everything so you can't actually see what's going
on.

So, the whole thing is just a huge, inelegant mess from start to finish. A real
steaming turd of a movie.

3/10 - There's a few effects shots that are quite nice, but really, don't waste
your time.

The Hangover

So... four guys go on a stag night in Las Vegas and get utterly hammered.
Mayhem ensues. They wake the following morning, none of them can remember what
happened, and the groom's missing. His friends must therefore track him down
before the wedding.

So far, so "Dude, Where's My Car." It's a staggeringly unoriginal plot. If you
were to show me a 1920s silent movie with this plot, I wouldn't be at all
surprised.

The quality, then, has to be in the execution, and it's actually pretty darned
funny, really. It's pretty much an even split between black comedy and
slapstick. If you're likely to be amused by seeing a baby belted in the face
with a car door, this is certainly the movie for you. I'd say the whole film
sits on the comedy spectrum somewhere between Old School and a Kevin Smith
movie. Which I intend as a recommendation.

Terminator Salvation

Or, "If the machines want to take out humanity, they'd better be sure they kill
Batman first."

It would be an insult to everyone on Mono to suggest that they need a synopsis
of the plot. John Connor, in the future, fighting Skynet. Seriously, you do the
math.

The battle details one of Connor's earlier battles with Skynet, no more, no
less. Lots of hardware made of pigiron goes boom. We see a few cool new breeds
of terminator, and - hey look! Michael Ironside is a hardass! Nice to see you
again Michael! Top bloke.

The real question is, is it any good? The problem with judging that is that no
film will ever be as good as Terminator or Terminator 2, including Terminator
and Terminator 2. Seriously, I watched Terminator 2 last night, and it's just
about pretty good, but 20 years haven't been kind to it. The effects stand up,
but the plot's pretty dumb, and I will never know how we tolerated Edward
Furlong at the time. So, given that, I guess this is an acceptable, but less
good sequel. It's a bit of a mess, and the ending is pretty dumb, but it
rattles along entertainingly enough, and it looks pretty cool.

One thing that this film does *not* really do is take the franchise in any
interesting new directions. The brief is to film a bit of what we know
happened, and make it exciting. No real risks are taken, and so I suppose it
succeeds in not failing, it fails in not succeeding too.


7/10. Capable enough Explodo.