Sensible Netnonsense

Everyone. Loves. Transformers.

Why?

Because Optimus Prime kicks ass. Well, among other things.

The genius behind Michael Bay is his unique approach to the franchise. I mean considering he didn’t want to do this movie in the beginning, it was a great stroke of luck that he decided to do it in the end. Bay has that knack of taking outrageous action and placing it into the mold of realism, like what he did with his previous movies, Bad Boys 1 and 2, The Rock, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. After all, he did spend a big chunk of the $150M budget not on visual effects and CG animation, but instead on reality-based action sequences. And like I said earlier, he based a lot of the action and CG animation on reality.

So if you guys noticed, the Autobots and Decepticons don’t just transform magically. There was real engineering and mathematics that went behind the creation of each robot, so in the cinema, they looked extremely believable transforming from vehicle to robot and vice versa that you would be insane not to think of them as real.

And Bay (also by way of his screenwriter, Tom DeSanto—who interestingly enough also wrote the screenplay for Xmen and partially for X2) has a great way of telling stories of different perspectives and then letting them mesh together at a critical point in the movie. Very much like what he did with Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. Although admittedly, the storyline intersection in Transformers didn’t quite hit the jackpot (I mean for one thing, Anthony Anderson’s role as the super hacker/decoder seemed a bit forced while Megan Fox’s background story was just put there to explain her obvious knowledge of cars). Some may have found it interesting and believable, while others, like me, would have seen right through it and thought “they had the money, so they needed the big name actors in there.”

I mean honestly, we could have done without John Turturro and Anthony Anderson’s characters, and put more focus on the main folks of the story. Heck even Tyrese Gibson, who was top billing at the end credits, could have been left out of the story altogether. But hey, with a big budget like that, why scrimp on talent? Besides, John Turturro in his S7 undershirt and colored boxers was a beautiful insert.

Some humor could have been toned down too. Like that garden sketch, making the Autobots hide in the backyard—it was stretched too thin and overplayed in my opinion—and then the outtakes of Sam’s parents in the end—went to the extent of being corny.

But nevertheless, the brilliance of Michael Bay shined through, most especially with the action sequences—which, to my estimation, were almost every other sequence in the film. I mean the flow of the movie was so well done that you could not get out of your seat to take a piss, or else you’d miss a lot. And boy, going back to the realism aspect of the movie, having the robots move fluidly in and out of their default vehicle phase to robot phase was amazing! Though one sequence was lost because of poor shot selection, that one where Prime skewered Bonecrusher in the head under the bridge—it honestly could have been done better. But the other sequences were top notch, especially the highway chase sequence (did you see Bonecrusher skating down the highway and Prime transforming to a screeching halt to meet him?) and the city battle sequences (Starscream zooming in and out of jet phase, and Devastator raining shrapnel on the marines and the Autobots, hot damn!).

Overall, the comedic inserts of Shia LaBeouf and non-stop action sequences made Transformers take the top spot in the box office. And if that’s not enough, getting my fill of Megan Fox and Rachael Taylor made it even better.

Here’s a bit of trivia for you geeks:

• It took approximately 38 hours for the animators Industrial Light & Magic to render one frame of the CGI animation to portray the Transformers. This breaks the record set by Weta Workshop for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), where it took 20 hours to animate a frame of CGI to portray the Ent Treebeard.

• In the "Transformers" (1984) series, the Autobots had blue optics (eyes) and the Decepticons had red optics. The animators created a new eye design resembling a camera shutter in order to make the robots more engaging; however, in a nod to the series, the color scheme remains the same. The only exception being Frenzy, who is a Decepticon, but has blue optics.

For more Trivia, check out the movie’s IMDB page.