I'm one of the most anal people I know, but I also tend to be fair. I find that most critics aren't very fair to a film. They're very black and white. If a critic finds a certain propensity of elements he or she doesn't like, the entire film becomes crap, regardless of what else the film contains.
Which leads me to not give a damn most of the time about what critics think.
The film has a definite narrative. It's obvious and it's straightforward.
The problem is, it may not have been the best narrative to use for a Transformers movie. The whole "globetrotting, Indiana Jones/National Treasure angle just...doesn't work as well when it's about random robot talismans and not well known religious artifacts and well known historical documents and whatnot, and ends up feeling a bit forced.
Actually, I figured that Alice saw what Sam was writing on the walls and how he was acting and that tipped off the Decepticons. Alice was probably sent in as a spy to either kill Sam or get info for Starscream on what the Autobots were up to. Her seeing the writing was what set her in motion to get him.
Exactly. This is the kind of stuff...it's in the movie. It's just not spelled out, nor should it be, or there'd be literally no tension or surprise factor to the film.
It has a theme but it's incomplete. It has character arcs, but they are also incomplete.
Which theme does it have that's incomplete?
The only character arcs it had are all completed as far as I could tell. The only one that isn't resolved is Megatron and Starscream, and frankly, even that is somewhat resolved when they both join forces and flee together at the end of the story.
I didnt like Jetfire's speech though, I dont like when one guy has to explain the whole movie in one speech.
The rule of screenwriting is "show, don't tell" when you can. Any ideas how you "show" something like that?
I've noticed for years, even before the internet when I would get into arguments with friends and other people in person, that when most people(and critics for that matter)hate a movie one of the things they almost always say is that "it had no plot". That is such nonsense, technically every movie has a plot, it's just a matter of how well it was written. Maybe it has a lot of plot holes and lame or childish dialogue...but it still stands that every movie(maybe not documentaries of course)has and to be honest needs a plot to actually be a film or in general tell a story.
Well said. I remember people who were trying to explain why they didn't like X3 saying things like "It has no plot". Sometimes that's just the tipoff that this person really doesn't know what they're talking about. Because if they did, especially in the case of critics, they would be intelligent enough to articulate why. Most people can't. I don't put much validity in those people's statements.
As this brilliant piece shows, just because you can basically, sort of, but not really describe the threadbare "plot" of the film doesn't mean it actually comes together resembling anything close to a coherent narrative when it's there on screen.
The plot is simple to describe. There's no "almost" about it, and there's no reaching to explain it. Would you like to see it described?
So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.
There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.
Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.
What this person apparently means at the end here is "I'm too damn stupid once the plot began to be anything resembling to be complex" to be able to follow it.
I'm sorry...this summary of the film is like me saying "THE DARK KNIGHT is about this guy who's a bat...and uh...he runs around after this guy called The Joker who ends up wanting to blow up a boat for some reason". It's reducing it for the sake of an argument, which isn't exactly fair to the material itself.
The symbols DO make sense by the end of the movie...obviously this person was not paying attention.
But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot.
Hyberbolic in the extreme.
-Sam goes off the college, leaving his parents and his girlfriend. Drama ensues.
-Sam and his quest to save Optimus. Simmons, Mikaela, and Leo are all a part of this plotline.
-The Decepticons revenge, encompassing Megatron's revival, Megatron taking over from Starscream.
-The Fallen's return to Earth. Pretty self explanatory.
-NEST being shut down.
That's really about it in terms of actual storylines. Most of these are very small ones.
20 or 30 of them? Obviously this person doesn't know the difference between storyline and sequence. Because Sam meeting a roomate who happens to have a website is not a seperate storyline. It's part of an existing storyline, Sam going to college, and is woven into the next storyline, Sam's quest to save Optimus.
But, it does. The narrative is there. The reason it doesn't feel coherent is the filler in the film.
It feels coherent to me. But then, I'm not easily distracted by jokes that last a few seconds. Apparently, many are.
I'm glad people are arguing back and forth about things that were expained or not explained. When I see the movie(hopefully Saturday night)I'll make sure to see what's right or wrong. I can see why people would miss out on certain key lines of dialogue if the movie is as in your face with the action as people are saying.
There are some things in this movie that people have *****ed about that you only would miss if you went to the bathroom or simply weren't paying attention. Someone, as said above, questioned how Sam's parents got in Egypt, when in the movie, there's an entire SCENE devoted to the Decepticon attack on Paris and the kidnap of the Witwickys.
And there are other things that are just so damn obvious that I don't understand why people even bother.
"Why are there two of some of the robots?"
Gee...I wonder why out of dozens of robots, there are similar shapes and forms...Hmm...
"Why is Bumblee not talking?"
Because...
1. He can't.
2. He doesn't want to.
Pick one and move on, or say what you mean, which is "Why doesn't Bumblee talk a lot, and sound like Casey Kasem?"
Megan Fox isn't a horrible actress, she just lacks charisma in quieter moments. She's a hot girl who's never had to be anything but, and she acts like one. So yeah, her performance as a hot girl who cares about her boyfriend and has some insecurities was pretty decent, and she did have some pretty good emotional moments, if melodramatic ones.
And again...I'm beating a dead horse into paste here, but what would a better story involve? I've been asking this for three years and no one has answered it particularly well.
