Movie review: Transformers

I'm waiting with bated breath for this week's Totally Rad Show. Alex and the boys should have their hands full debating the merits of the new Transformers flick, which I just saw. (OK, I gave into peer pressure…sue me. Actually, please don't.) And given the way they totally railed on Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four 2, it'll be interesting to see how they rate this.

Sabrina, her husband Frank and I went after producing our 4th of July newscast, which Clynt awesomely anchored, giving us the night off. We stood in line for 20 minutes, got pummeled by the snow on Guam exhibit and caught a pretty good summertime movie. Tonight was the third night the movie's been out, and it was jam-packed. We had to settle for seats in the rightmost corner of the third row. I'm blogging this with a partially stiff neck after looking nearly directly skyward for 2.5 hours. I'm glad I went.

**SPOILER ALERT**

(If you haven't seen the picture yet, don't bother reading on.)

I'm really going to sound like a nerd, and I don't normally nitpick to this great a degree with movies, but one gross omission/inaccuracy drove me nuts…kinda like how Colossus wasn't Russian in X-Men 2 and 3. Even fairweather fans know Devastator isn't a tank. I guess explaining the Constructicons within the storyline would have been too difficult, although the already-greenlit sequels plan to incorporate them, as well as the Dinobots.

Otherwise…

• The movie really took a long time to get started, and mainly because of cornball antics and unnecessary comic bits in the first hour that could have been left on the cutting room floor. And the Autobots really look like wussies after their introduction when hiding around the house.
• Charlie Adler, who's done a million voices in cartoons, played Starscream and should have gotten more lines. A lot more. He's done everything from Jem, My Little Pony and Tiny Toons to I Am Weasel. The man's a legend.
• The All Spark looks more like the Lament Configuration than it does an energon cube. I'm just sayin'.
  
• Despite what I said earlier, the whole Bumblebee-as-Camaro thing actually worked for me. So did Megatron as a psycho jet.
  
• Jon Turturro was amazing - equally brilliant, funny and detestable. (His Nokia bit is hilarious!) Jon Voight was also great.
• The "more than meets the eye" gag that was way overused went from being clever, then cute to repetitive to just plain unoriginal.
• The flick is going to make some big-time endorsement bucks from the prominently pimped corporations: Apple, HP, Nokia, Ford, eBay, etc.
  
• Ratchet as a Hummer ambulance freakin' rocks!
• Hugo Weaving (aka, The Matrix's Agent Smith) was Megatron. I thought he sounded familiar.
• Prime's "'Til All Are One" soundbyte was ripped off from 1987's "Transformers the Movie". If you were in the theater this evening, that loud "Stale!" you might have heard was me.
• And lastly, this is one of those things you'd only pick up on if you were from Guam...but near the end of the movie, they talk about burying robotic remains in "The Laurentian Abyss, the deepest part of the ocean, 7 miles deep." Sorry, dude...that's the Marianas Trench.
  

Overall, check it out. It's a fantastic time.