When the dust settles and the solar flares fade away, two of the heaviest of heavy hitters in this 2009 blockbuster season--Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen--will linger on as brothers at odds. Though both films were scripted by the writing team of Kurtzman and Orci, you might walk away demanding to see the pedigree papers. Here are two vastly disparate genre films that don't even belong in the same class, let alone the same IMDB page. Helmed by J.J. Abrams, Star Trek is a thoughtful, rollicking adventure film. It's a joyous movie experience filled with top notch performances and dazzling effects, all stemming from cues from that tight, inventive screenplay. As for Transformers? It's a parade of poor choices, all culminating in the latest salvo in Michael Bay's campaign of stupid. It's devastatingly easy to slip into hyperbole when describing this tedious sequel, especially relative to the writers' previous effort, and even in comparison to the first film in the franchise.
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I left the screening feeling seventeen shades of bad for Orci and Kurtzman. Not because they wrote a bad script, or that they wrote a good script ruined by a misguided director, but because I honestly have no idea what they even wrote. It all reeks of foul play, and there's no knowing who's responsible by simply watching the movie. We're pretty sure they had little or nothing to do with the clanking Jar Jar Binks twins. But was it their call to cut away to a shot of dogs humping each other in the midst of an action sequence? I'd love to get my hands on the original script, just to see how much of this was meddling on Michael Bay's part. Regardless of whether it was his idea or not, I could sense the visceral, pornographic pleasure he took in destroying a university library. "**** books"!
