More and more, I'm learning that the key to enjoying most movies these days is to bring my expectations down as far as they can possibly go. Then, when the movie is merely bad instead of atrocious, I don't feel quite so let down when I leave the theater.
Unfortunately, I'm guessing this is what I will need to do with the July 2007 'Transformers' movie.
The most recent issue of Wizard magazine (yes... I read Wizard... congratulations... you're cooler than me) quoted Lorenzo di Bonaventura - one of the movie's producers - as saying, "The scale of the Transformers is so big... but how do the humans play out? How do you make sure the human actors have an equal role?"
Allow me to answer that little question for you, Lorenzo: YOU DON'T!!!
Here's a little tip for ya... people who go to see a movie called 'Transformers' aren't seeing it because they wanna see a bunch of actors flapping their lips... WE WANNA SEE BIG ROBOTS DUKING IT OUT! We wanna see laser blasts and explosions and crumbling buildings. No one is going to give a shit about the stupid fucking 'love story' you're ramming into it (which they are, of course, doing). Why does EVERY movie have to have a romance in it anyway? WE WANT ROBOTS, DAMMIT! I gotta look at PEOPLE every frigging day... when I go to my big, dumb, fighting-robot-movie, that is exactly what I want to see... no more, no less.
What if they jammed a space battle in the middle of 'When Harry Met Sally'? Everyone would say "What the hell was THAT?" Y'know why? Because a space battle has no place in a gooey romantic comedy. SO WHY DO THEY ALWAYS GOTTA JAM THESE STOOPID LOVE STORIES IN MY BIG, DUMB SCI-FI THRILLERS? Didn't any of these idiots learn ANYTHING from the horrible American remake of 'Godzilla'?
There were two major reasons as far as I can tell that 'Godzilla' flopped as badly as it did:
1) It was jammed with so-called 'name' actors who were doing it entirely for the humungous paycheck.
and, most of all...
2) It had absolutely no loyalty to the source material.
Which seems to be the case with 'Transformers' as well... they seem intent on changing all the very core, key elements that have kept the franchise alive this whole time. Rather than merely give the characters slightly updated and film-friendly designs (as Sam Raimi did with 'Spider-Man') they've gone down this ultra-complex road that so many producers tread when they have no idea what their doing. "I don't know what a good robot design looks like, so I'll just make sure it's got lots and lots of really complicated stuff on it."
Two of the biggest and most successful movie franchises in the last several years were 'Spider-Man' and 'Lord of the Rings'... doesn't anyone in Hollywood bother to notice why those movies were so great? Do they think they were just multiple flukes? Argh.
Here's another gem from Lorenzo on whether or not they'll cast the original voice actors from the TV show: "Some of these guys are TV cartoon guys. I want to get better characters if we can."
Ah - of course... another brilliant bit of producing. "TV cartoon = bad... high-priced bigshot movie actor = good"... never mind the fact that, once again, you're writing off one of the elements that made these characters popular as insignificant.
Double Argh.
Anyway, the ONE good thing they've done is hire Peter Cullen to do the voice of Optimus Prime... Cullen was the original voice actor on the 'Transformers' animated TV show and animated movie. No one else can do Prime as far as I'm concerned. Now if they REALLY want to take another bold step in the right direction, they'll hire Frank Welker to return as Megatron.
The bottom line here is that everyone involved with this film seems to have an agenda of making it as distant from the source material as they possibly can. They seem to be trying really hard to fight the fact that this is supposed to be a big, dumb, fun, geeky science fiction story with big fighting robots.
The tragedy is, there are probably countless hungry, young producers, directors and actors out there who would have embraced it with open arms and done an amazing job for half the money - but, no, the Hollywood machine is ever-insistant that it's not broken when, in fact, it's belching smoke, leaking oil, low on gas and dragging a rusty muffler behind it.
1 comment:
John, you're hilarious. And, for once, I agree with you. I just want to see a bunch of robots duking it out. Hollywood just wants a way to get the female of the species into the theater with their boyfriends. What they don't understand is that we like big robots, too.
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