Transformers (2007)
Directed by Michael Bay
Young teenager Sam Witwicky becomes involved in the ancient struggle between two extraterrestrial factions of transforming robots – the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons. Sam holds the clue to unimaginable power and the Decepticons will stop at nothing to retrieve it.
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What critics compared Transformers to
With its city-block-levelling action sequences that recall Transformers, to the characters’ adolescent enthusiasm that mirrors similar moments in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, Power Rangers feels late to the party, its every move telegraphed by earlier films.
Perhaps the two most obvious pieces of franchise DNA present in this film are ones you shouldn't want to emulate: Michael Bay’s Transformers and the Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films.
In fact, from the symphonic music that plays over the opening credits to the film’s glacially-paced origin story and the city-destroying robot fight with which it culminates, “Power Rangers” owes far more to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the “Twilight” generation, and Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies than it does its own source material.
Case in point: “Power Rangers,” a movie for people who find “Transformers” too intellectually challenging.
Following in the childhood-exhuming footsteps of Transformers, 21 Jump Street, and now CHIPS (or, if you’re old-school, CHiPs), comes Hollywood’s latest high-risk wager on low-brow nostalgia, Power Rangers .
Inevitably, director Dean Israelite and writer John Gatins incorporate the franchise's sillier and more nostalgic underpinnings, from snippets of the "Go go Power Rangers" theme that chased many a parent from the room to a seemingly inevitable "Transformers" joke.
Director Peter Berg has crafted an almost fetishistic homage to Michael Bay — like Bay's "Transformers" series, this is yet another action extravaganza inspired by a Hasbro product — with its epic set pieces, swaggering bravado, panoramic skies and cheesy romance.
Peter Berg has crafted a carbon copy of the Transformers series, though while it passes on Michael Bay’s lewd shot portrayal of women, it can’t boast the raw thrills of the first movie either.
The plot sounds like a combination of “Independence Day,” “Armageddon” and “Transformers,” and in many ways, this film tries to replicate the formula that made those three pictures massively successful.
The overuse of generic computer-generated special effects - ie this stuff feels like leftovers from the Transformers series - ensures that the myriad of battle sequences are akin to video game cut scenes, with the resulting absence of context or excitement playing an integral role in the movie's astonishing (and palpable) downfall.
Nevertheless, for a film based on an outdated board game, “Battleship” delivers a nice balance of action and humor that reminded me a lot of another alien invasion movie, “Independence Day.” It’s probably more on par with the first “ Transformers ” than the Roland Emmerich sci-fi classic, but the sheer fact that it's entertaining at all makes “Battleship” more of a hit than a miss.
It borrows much too heavily from other films, especially "Transformers," and its first 20 minutes drag as it details the boneheaded antics of boy-man protagonist Alex Hooper (Taylor Kitsch of "Friday Night Lights") before he lands a gig in the Navy.
As it turns out, Real Steel, directed by Night at the Museum’s Shawn Levy, borrows so much from other films that it might better be titled Reel Steal: not only from The Champ, but from Rocky, the Transformers movies and even some Star Wars.
Now, you can make a pop lunacy Happy Meal psychedelic mind destructor like the "Transformers," but that's only if you're Michael Bay, and if you're Michael Bay, you're too busy buttoning and unbuttoning your shirt in front of a mirror right now to read this.
This is basically a more restrained version of the robot fights in the Transformers films, which, while they’re done better here than in those films, still doesn’t make for a compelling concept.
Yes, it's intrinsically all quite goofy (imagine trying to watch this with a straight face before the success of the "Transformers" flicks), and Levy near completely botches the big final match between Atom (and, essentially, Jackman's character who's controlling him in "mirror mode" thus necessitating Jackman to pretty much fight the bout) and the resident, high tech and undefeated champion named - what else -- Zeus (I guess all of the Decepticon names were already taken).
There's that "Transformers" inspiration, of course, with a heavy dose of Rock'em Sock'em Robots thrown in.
Based "in part," according to the opening credits, on the 1956 short story "Steel" by the great Richard Matheson (the story previously inspired a 1963 episode of "The Twilight Zone"), "Real Steel" represents a canny welding of the state-of-the-art effects and boy-and-his-robot relationship of the "Transformers" films with the hoary sentiment of the tough guy-reformed-by-cute kid stories that have been a staple of motion pictures since the silent era.
His inspirational references include “The War of the Gargantuas,” “Godzilla,” “Transformers,” Francisco Goya’s painting “The Colossus” (depicting a terrifying giant towering over a valley), ‘80s and ‘90s kids TV programs, Power Rangers video gaming and Japanese Mech culture.
Movies like the “Transformers” series, “Real Steel” and even movies like 2005’s “King Kong” and 1998’s “Godzilla” hint at this level of filmmaking.
Unlike Mr. Bay, the untrammeled technologist of the "Transformers" franchise, Mr. del Toro is an imagist, a fantasist and, at his best, a cinema poet of highly charged horror.
If it has exhilarating action sequences, it could have been fun---dumb and shallow fun, perhaps, but at least it would have been enjoyed enough on a purely superficial level a la Transformers.
On the one hand, the cast is notably second-tier and the plot--giant, human-operated robots fighting giant, alien sea monsters off the coast of Hong Kong--seems like a cross between Battleship and the Transformers movies .
For every big budget monster movie like Godzilla and Cloverfield, there’s been a thousand more we’ve forgotten, while Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise has shown that audiences will pay through the nose to see giant robots smash each other, no matter how crude and addled the screenplay.
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Michael Bay's third Transformers movie brazenly evoked 9/11, and one action movie after another has done the same.
Without the wit, winks, flirtation and old-fashioned sentiment of the “Truth, justice and the American way” take on the character, all Henry Cavill (“Immortals”) has to do is mix it up in a lot of “Transformers” inspired brawls with armored-plated aliens and occasionally agonize over it all.
That’s partially because he has to participate in a giant action climax that uncomfortably recalls the final battle in Michael Bay’s third Transformers movie.
The picture borrows imagery from movies much better ( The Matrix , for one) and not much worse (the Transformers films).
The moral issue is certainly perplexing, as all those falling buildings are likely killing thousands of people, none of whom are given even a second thought, but there is also the issue of artistic banality: So many modern action films end in this manner, from Michael Bay’s deadening Transformers movies to Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), that the impact of entire city blocks being turned into rubble is virtually nonexistent.
The goal from the studio and filmmakers was clearly to emulate the gritty, more realistic style of Christopher Nolan's masterful " The Dark Knight ," but without that picture's depth of character and classical storytelling prowess it more accurately resembles the joyless, destructive freneticism of Michael Bay's mechanical (in all senses of the term) " Transformers " series.
Director-screenwriter Joss Whedon makes excellent use of 3-D, and, despite the overload of special effects and kabooms, he doesn’t turn the movie into a head-rattling endurance test à la Michael Bay ’s “ Transformers ” series.
It is inevitable that comparison between the final attack on Manhattan and the destruction of Chicago in the third "Transformers" movie will be made because there are too many similarities, right down to the mechanical flying 'creatures' from Chitauri vs. "Fallen's" giant drill bit.
Outstanding special effects and stuntwork contribute to an exhilaration so constant it risks the kind of exhaustion, if not monotony, inspired by the Transformers pictures.
There's a-like intensity of lines filled with portent, and just as "Here's lookin' at you, kid" could have been corny in lesser hands than Humphrey Bogart's, the same dynamic holds here: When the evil, complicated Loki talks of his "terrible privilege" or when Rogers, echoing Tommy Lee Jones in Captain America: The First Avenger , speaks of war being "won by soldiers," they make it work on a visceral, emotional level.To criticize the conventions of superpowers or costumes, or to pigeonhole this into a "popcorn movie" ghetto misses the point: This isn't Transformers .
That said, those action scenes are staged in a manner that puts the sights offered up by their blockbuster brethren to shame--the difference between the graceless pummelings on display in the "Transformers" films and the stylish and cohesive set-pieces on display here is so startling that uber-hacks like Michael Bay and McG should hang their heads in shame at the sight of what Whedon has accomplished here.
They brawl, they bond and then, boy, do they kick some alien butt in a city-wrecking slugfest that puts Michael Bay's bombastic Transformers franchise in the shade.
Unlike Michael Bay’s “Transformers” behemoths, the plot and editing are coherent, with elements of fun sci-fi fantasy worthy of H.G. Wells combined with some contemporary paranoia.
Taken as a whole, the 2014 reboot, the 2019 Godzilla: King of Monsters , and now Godzilla vs. Kong remind me of nothing so much as Michael Bay’s Transformers movies from the 2000s: big, personality-free blockbusters where all the attention is lavished on the CGI characters, while A-list actors are thrown willy-nilly without regard for whatever human qualities they bring to the project.
That’s a rare subtlety in a movie that makes the much-maligned Michael Bay’s Transformers flicks look comparatively restrained.
Instead, it’s because the latest (and possibly final) installment of Warner Brothers’ “Monsterverse” series bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Bay’s oft-derided (but financially successful) Transformers franchise.
Without denigrating Henry’s work here, think Anthony Anderson’s Glen Whitmann in Transformers (2007) except not trying to be the comic relief.
Wingard’s film boasts the sort of multicharacter structure that was pioneered by Independence Day and duplicated by Godzilla (1998), Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and its own franchise predecessors—save, that is, for Gareth Edwards’ superior 2014 Godzilla, which captured a ground-level-POV sense of mythic awe that’s since been replaced by extravagant rock ‘em sock ‘em mayhem (Edwards’ signature sight of figures, and missiles, plummeting thru space, trails of smoke behind them, remains).
It wants to play with surreal Egyptian imagery but is so 2016 that it mistakes human gods with animal heads for organic derivatives of Michael Bay's Transformers .
God of Egypt wants to be a swords-and-sandals epic that can upshift into a Transformers movie when it needs to, but the movie is so roughshod and anemic that it barely wrestles up the energy to be either.
I will, however, compare the film to a franchise in the same medium, Michael Bay's "Transformers," which is pretty much as far from fun as I've ever experienced at the multiplex.
I compare this to Transformers because it really looks like someone thought, “You know what Exodus needed?
Or take something more recent like the first “Transformers” film.
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The characters mostly work, the jokes come fast and they mostly land – there's a gag about chilli which includes multiple uses of the word “fart” that even had me laughing out loud – and enough movie references – Avengers , Transformers , Pacific Rim and the Indiana Jones series are only the most obvious ones – to keep the grownups chuckling and appreciating just how hard Fowler and Co. are working.
Aggressively referencing everything from Ghostbusters to Transformers , Sonic The Hedgehog 2 is a mishmash of other event pictures, with Fowler trying to make a joke of the story’s obvious cinematic benchmarks.
These high jinks more closely resemble Michael Bay’s Transformers, the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks, or live-action Scooby-Doo films.
Mr. Bay has always been a kind of cross between Tony Scott and Roland Emmerich, so it's appropriate that his "Transformers" borrows so much from Mr. Emmerich's 1996 July 4th extravaganza "Independence Day".
Speaking as one who remembers the Transformers phenomenon of the mid-’80s but has no emotional connection to it, I say the movie is often laughably corny, no more thrilling than any typical action movie, and akin to “Independence Day” in its reliance on questionable science and dubious logic.
The film starts off like an alien-invasion picture, telling the Transformers story as though it were "Independence Day."
It makes that "classic" midsummer alien invasion movie, Independence Day, seem like a template for inventive plotting and solid character development.