By Paco McCullough
Sorry for the delay. Here is one of two Transformers reviews that we'll be posting in the next couple of days.
Transformers Dark Of The Moon is a bad movie. It is not a horrible film like its predecessor, but it’s also not in any way a good film. It is incredibly long, with most of the film being nothing more than filler. What doesn’t work as a 150 minute long film could have possibly worked as a 90 minute film.
There are a few redeemable elements of Transformers. The visuals are uniformly impressive. Several actors I love are in this film for some reason. Amongst these: John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and John Turturro. These characters are wasted in meaningless supporting roles that just serve to further distract from the overall plot. While the cast and visuals are spectacular, it is not enough to save the movie.
One of the most significant problems with Transformers is its running time. For a film that is ostensibly about robots fighting each other, there is a significant amount of time leveraged on unnecessary subplots that do nothing to drive the film forward. Because of this, the first hour and a half of the film are agonizingly slow. These subplots don’t help elevate any of the characters from their archetypes. We have the cranky boss, the average guy, the hot girlfriend, the tough marine, and several more. Most of these characters seem to exist more to stretch the runtime than for any real narrative reason.
The climax, an epic showdown in Chicago, is about an hour long. For the first twenty minutes or so, it is exciting. There’s only so many ways to show giant CGI robots fighting, and once that peak is reached, the action begins to feel quite repetitive.
The whole film is a mess. Don’t waste your time.
1.5 out of 5 stars
© Tanner McCullough, 2011
Sorry for the delay. Here is one of two Transformers reviews that we'll be posting in the next couple of days.
Transformers Dark Of The Moon is a bad movie. It is not a horrible film like its predecessor, but it’s also not in any way a good film. It is incredibly long, with most of the film being nothing more than filler. What doesn’t work as a 150 minute long film could have possibly worked as a 90 minute film.
There are a few redeemable elements of Transformers. The visuals are uniformly impressive. Several actors I love are in this film for some reason. Amongst these: John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and John Turturro. These characters are wasted in meaningless supporting roles that just serve to further distract from the overall plot. While the cast and visuals are spectacular, it is not enough to save the movie.
One of the most significant problems with Transformers is its running time. For a film that is ostensibly about robots fighting each other, there is a significant amount of time leveraged on unnecessary subplots that do nothing to drive the film forward. Because of this, the first hour and a half of the film are agonizingly slow. These subplots don’t help elevate any of the characters from their archetypes. We have the cranky boss, the average guy, the hot girlfriend, the tough marine, and several more. Most of these characters seem to exist more to stretch the runtime than for any real narrative reason.
The climax, an epic showdown in Chicago, is about an hour long. For the first twenty minutes or so, it is exciting. There’s only so many ways to show giant CGI robots fighting, and once that peak is reached, the action begins to feel quite repetitive.
The whole film is a mess. Don’t waste your time.
1.5 out of 5 stars
© Tanner McCullough, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment