Over Thinking It. |
June 28th, 2009 |
As some of you may know by my few twitters and text messages to my close friends I was greatly dissapointed with Transformers 2.
Growing up, I was a Transformers dork. My brother and I had all of our personal drawings of each character taped to our bedroom wall like crayola’s ode to robotic wallpaper. I have not lost touch with my roots since that time. I thought the first movie was pretty good. I thought the love story was worthless and shallow. It would have been much better if Megan Fox didn’t exist in the movie but were replaced by nerd girl that had that innocent, helpful, and dorky class about her as they both realized through their out-of-this-world experience that they were both fond of each other. The transformers had that crass dialogue about them, some of them were just as hot-headed as I remember, and there were many old characters I fondly remember back in front of my popcorn bucket and myself.
Alas, I was drawn into a packed theatre for the sequal. Without exhausting your reading skills on here, I’ll just say I was greatly dissapointed. Not only with the film, but with the audience as well. As a once childhood cartoon brought to modern film, it wasn’t handled well. The advanced robots from another world came and most of them chose (the good guys, mind you) to assimilate the characteristics and syntax and crude discourse of unintelligent earthlings. As a child I just don’t remember my heroes cursing and making sexual gestures or comments. I would even argue that robots are asexual beings to begin with, so their lust for humans wouldn’t be plausible or possible. Am I being overly conservative? I don’t think so, I just thought the self-aware robots and the writer would have better taste. Where’s the class? The heart? I had no connection to any character. If they died, I wouldn’t be sad. If they took a stand, I wouldn’t support them. Outside of screenplay preference, there is a deeper moral issue that was a rude awakening
When Megan Fox first appeared straddling her motorcycle there was a vast cheering like a male chorus throughout the room. One fellow even stood up clapping like a proud mother at her son’s first piano recital. Throughout the film, there where many comments behind us from men oogling about her as though she were a feast to be taken. It were as though we were in the theatre when the Gremlins take over the city and are all watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1984’s “Gremlins.”
I suppose I just didn’t realize how lustful some can be. I hadn’t considered that a television show of old could lose it’s innocence when adapted for the screen. I guess I’m just sad. I love art, elegance, excellence. Not pop culture, but I suppose it sells.
Autobots- roll out.
