| Monday, June 25, 2007 |
11:04 - Too much to meet the eye
http://www.thesmokesellers.com/?p=1022
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I was all set to go through images I found online and do side-by-side comparisons of various characters in the new Transformers movie versus their "classic" appearances... but in the process I found this site that has already done it for me. It's in Spanish, but the images are the important thing, and you can get the general gist: "Dios, pobre hombre, a este lo han desfigurado pero de verdád."
 
Cover up the one on the left with your hand. If you can identify who the one on the right is supposed to be—and this goes for any of the other similar examples on the site—you're a better man than I. I mean, yeah, the robot designs never were very plausible as things that were supposed to physically fit into the shapes of the cars and trucks and jets and pistols and things they transformed into, without having all kinds of telltale fins and portholes and stuff sticking out of the body panels of what's supposed to look like a bone-stock VW Beetle or Lamborghini Countach (and that's to say nothing of the uncomfortable questions of relative size, where cassette tapes and tractor-trailers somehow turned into robots of comparable size to each other). But... is this really what was necessary?
It's even worse than that, though. On-screen, in motion, you don't even have the luxury of staring at a still frame of a carefully arranged pose for several seconds until you figure out what are arms and what are legs and just who the hell it's supposed to be. The movie has dark backgrounds and shadows and smoke and a million constantly moving parts that defy any attempt at being associated with a character:
I mean, dude, what the hell?
I kinda want to see this just because I grew up squarely in the middle of the Transformers meme pool, and it was the center of my life for several awkward years. I'm not one to obsess over the kooky directions the franchise has taken in past decades (ill-advised CGI TV series in which the robots transform into animals and all the backgrounds and set pieces are made of shiny metal); but I can look at this movie and wonder just what in hell it has in common with the thing from the 80s aside from the title.
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Brian Tiemann
