Transformers

This may contain a weak spoiler or two.

I go to the movies only about once every few months nowadays. My seasonal trip to the theatre took me to Transformers last night. Oh boy. Lots of crazy animation, a few explosions and a whole heap of transformations! The most AMAZING transformation of the movie, though, was the how the movie transformed my childhood joy into a pile of crap. So disappointing. I know it may be a little shocking to hear that a Michael Bay film lacked and semblance of soul, but, alas, it did. It wasn't that I was expecting anything too deep or moving, but it would have been nice to care a little about the main characters (or ANY characters for that matter). I guess it is good to see that some aspect of the 2-D original cartoon series was preserved in the flatness of the characters. Megatron wasn't in the movie much, but he had way more personality than anyone/thing in the movie. I almost wanted him to destroy the earth. Oh, spoiler alert: he doesn't destroy the earth.

Another interesting thing to look out for is the treatment of African-Americans in the film. There are a few black characters, a car salesman, a computer hacker, a soldier, and one of the transformers, Jazz, talks like a street stereotype. I'll just point you to this other blog post to get a more in depth understanding of Bay's treatment of these characters. Spoiler alert: To that, I'd only add that Jazz is the only Autobot ("good" transformer) that doesn't survive. For fun, take a look at how the Latino soldier and the Indian(?) phone operator characters.

More than meets the eye indeed.