Philosophy, cookery and geekery

That brings my count this summer up to, what, four in as many weeks? Which is a lot for me…

The film in question was Transformers, that classic Hasbro toy collection which has not managed to escape the current trend of finding anything that kids liked 10 or so years ago, and making a movie of it. It’s not properly out yet, but Friday was preview day; due to a slightly complicated misunderstanding between a workmate and VUE cinema, he turned up with three friends and an appropriate number of tickets to see the preview, precisely 24 hours too early. (The fact that the screening was at one minute past midnight should explain this, but it was still the VUE manager being a muppet; “12.01am on Thursday” DOES mean 12.01am on Thursday, NOT 12.01am on Friday, just after the end of Thursday.)

His three friends were planning on leaving Cambridge the next morning, so he found me and two other friends to take instead I was ready and prepared for the visual extravaganza that it was, but had also braced myself for a complete lack of storyline and on this score, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, nobody had been paid a lot of money to come up with a gripping, thrilling storyline with plot twists and mystery; but it IS an action movie, and it’s meant to appeal to the people that played with transformers as kids, and their kids. It did have A plot, and that is that. More annoying was the insertion of quantities of Cheese more appropriate to a documentary on Somerset; some hideously corny lines (mainly between the Hero, Sam, and the (later his) Girl – said eventual romance itself being massively cliched, but let’s not hark on about a point that applies to so much of Hollywood these days) did bring the tone down somewhat. The robots themselves had mainly awful lines, but then they are robots, I guess… and there were occasional bits of sheer, let’s-not-take-ourselves-too-seriously-guys comic genius, which made up for it.

All in all, if you care about seeing this film, do it while it’s big-screen; the visual effects are very effective, there are some great tracks accompanying the action scenes, and you’re unlikely to find yourself wishing it’d hurry up and get to the interesting bits, after the first 15 minutes, as it’s essentially one set-piece after another. On DVD, most of this will be lost and it’s likely to become yet-another-action-movie which you forget as soon as it’s over.