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“One shall stand, one shall fall.”

– Optimus Prime (Transformers: The Movie [1986], Transformers [2007])

Before I even get into this, everyone should know that I have decided to break my own rating scale, and give this movie an extra star on top of my maximum: ******. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let the rant begin.

Throughout the past few years I have done everything I could to ignore the fact that a new Transformers movie was coming out. Yes, I still hold that the original cartoon movie is the best movie of all time. However, this new additional definitely ranks well up there. I’ve seen it twice in the theater, and it was significantly better the second time around (probably just five stars the first time), but I digress.

As soon as I heard about the new film, I was afraid that it was going to be a miserable mess. Hollywood just usually does not do a good job translating fan favorites, and considering that Transformers was created with the intent to sell toys, it admittedly doesn’t have that rich depth that are necessary to make a good movie. So, I was quite pleased when my fears were ungrounded.

If you are being fair, there really is no way that the film could have been better. Yes, there are a couple of goofy scenes in the film that I will probably remove to make myself a personal cut. But, honestly, after you see the film, ask yourself how you think you could have made it better without subverting the subject matter.

The first time I saw the film, the scenes focusing on Sam, and his lusting after Mikaela were excruciating, because it felt like they were wasting valuable time on these insignificant characters. But, the second time around it wasn’t so bad, because I knew that the scenes were fairly short in the whole scheme of things, also, as indicated by the image on the side there, Megan Fox is fairly attractive. Most of the humans in the film were utterly undeveloped, and it worked out perfectly, because they weren’t supposed to be the focus of the film.

I think the writers did a good job of pulling from the original source material to satiate the thirst of fans like myself, while maintaining a balance of mainstream elements to give it public appeal. The reprisal of Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime was critical to the success of this film. It just wouldn’t have been the same if some random dork did the voice. Furthermore, they even integrated classic quotes from the series and movie. Honestly, it would have been odd to have had the movie without Optimus saying, “Autobots, [transform and] roll out!”

Alright, I won’t go into further specifics about the film, since I think that everyone on the face of the planet should see it a few times, and I don’t want to completely ruin it for everyone. I’ll probably do a more comprehensive review with spoilers when it is finally released on DVD in the near future.

Yippee-ki-yay, mother[pg-13].

In a slow year for Hollywood, there has not been much of note. Generally speaking, we have just be flooded with sequels. Seems as though Hollywood is not willing to take a chance on much of everything.

I suppose they figure that if they know a movie will bomb it is better than taking a chance on a movie that might succeed.

Anyway, as we take into consideration the battle of the derivatives there are many to choose from, but most have been fairly awful so it is not really that tight of a race. Thus far, Die Hard 4, and Ocean’s Eleven 3 were the only sequels I saw this year that I walked out of the theater saying, “that was a good movie.” However, Die Hard blows Ocean’s Thirteen out of the water.

Having seen the film twice this past week, I’d have to say that I am pretty sure that it is the best unoriginal work this year, so far (I expect Transformers to top it tomorrow).

To start us off, I’ll talk about some of things about the film that I enjoyed.

The action sequences were great. They stayed true to the kinds of things done in the previous film (and other 80′s style action movies), while avoid much of the cheesy CGI effects plague modern films. They managed to put in a strong tech element without being overly lame. I’m glad they did not spend any of their time “refreshing drives.” However, it was really funny when they plugged in a coaxial cable to download 500 TB of data. Unfortunately, as in all things, it was not all good.

The biggest issue that prevented this film from being a perfect action movie was a conflict between film makers and money grubbing Hollywood tycoons. It is fairly obvious that the film was not shot as a watered down PG-13 flick. This comes through in just awful over dubs, and funky chop shots of action sequences. It was not enough to ruin the experience for me, but I sure it really bothers some people. Regardless, I’m sure the DVD release of the film will be fantastic.

Given the current movie situation, and fact this was fairly entertaining movie, I have decided to give it my highest recommendation: *****