Well, I just got back from seeing Transformers… I think I want my two and half hours back. In a nutshell it wasn’t horrible, but it certainly wasn’t good. The special effects in the fight sequences and all that stuff were fine, albeit hard to follow, but that’s probably because we were right up the front in the second row. But the script? What the hell happened?! Did someone write it only to have their dog eat it, then try to use it anyway?
There are just so many things wrong with it, I don’t know where to begin… for a start it suffered from the same lack of setup as Knocked Up; there’s just no explanation for most of the characters’ actions. There’s the obligatory love story intertwined, but that’s almost completely ignored except for the three scenes where it’s included anecdotally. There’s characters like Rachael Taylor’s (McCleod’s Daughters) who get all this dialog and setup at the start but then just completely disappear in the end.
And why did they go to the trouble of getting an Australian actress (well, Tasmanian, which probably explains a bit :P ) who actually has a real Australian accent, and getting her to put on a fake one? WTF? I don’t understand why this is done…
The whole thing, at two and a half hours, was already pretty long, but felt like it should have been at least an hour longer to actually fit enough in to make the story contiguous. As it was, so much was just random, or grotesquely cheap filler between arbitrary action sequences, that they would honestly have been better off not bothering.
So meh, way to make nothing good of one of my favourite childhood themes.
