Transformers

Y'know, I blame Buffy for the Transformers live-action movie being rubbish.

It’s clear what happened – the creators of Transformers decided that since their core audience would be geeks, they would (a) have a geek as main character, plus a major female who happens to be one of the top minds in coding just happen to be stunning, and (b) since geeks love Whedon and his brand of unfunny, awkward, pseudo-natural humour, fill the movie with that, too. Appropriately for a Bay movie, this is a car wreck, and not in a good way. It reminds me of nothing more than the revival of Doctor Who – a property that used to thrive because it took itself very seriously and strived for the epic despite being fundamentally childish, patronisingly repackaged to appeal to the ‘hip’, post-modern crowd, which means lots of contemporary references and slang that’ll ensure the movie is painfully, charmlessly dated in five years’ time, and a lot of painfully bad jokes.

Transformers the Movie introduced Optimus Prime by showing him transforming and leaping up over Decepticons, gunning them down one at a time before his iconic confrontation with Megatron, stirring and unashamedly cheesy 80s music pumping away in the background. Bay’s Transformers gives us Prime and his Autobots…hiding in a garden, stepping on ornaments and getting pissed on by dogs for most of their too-short appearance. That sums up this movie pretty well. How, how were we supposed to like the overpaid scriptwriter’s horribly-written stab at a loveable geek? Why were we supposed to care about the McGuffin that also turned into a bizarre deus ex machina? The point of giant robots is that they’re cool – how are we supposed to think so when Bumblebee pisses on the head of a pantomime secret agent, when Prime is clownish, when even when they’re fighting the designs are so complex, messy and indistinguishable that we can’t tell who’s who, and when the only robot who gets enough screen time to have any semblance of character is a weird chirping comedy Decepticon?

How did this ever get greenlighted? Why were they trying so hard to make it crap? Why on earth didn’t they borrow from some of the classic plots from the original, only make them slicker and cooler? What the fuck WAS this shit??



Whedon, I blame all this raping of my childhood on you.