Jordan Hoffman Dot Com

No, I didn’t expect this movie to be good. But I didn’t expect it to be quite so bad. This movie is just flat out offensive. It makes you realize how good the movies of Roland Emmerich are. It has no visual panache (like the similarly dumb but infinitely better 300) and its “real world” setting makes its rah rah patriotism deplorable. That and it is just flat-out boring!

But here is the big question – would I have liked this when I was twelve? I don’t know the answer to that. When I was a youngster I completely lost my shit over the movie Tron. To this day I am convinced that Tron is awesome. So, maybe, if the twelve year old boys like this movie (and they seem to) it might be considered a success. Tron, though, at least had an arc. I have no idea what the hell happens in Transformers. Frankly, I was so annoyed by what was happening that I couldn’t really pay attention. The movie in itself is distracting, if that makes any sense. All I know is that much like The Rock (the only other Michael Bay movie I’ve seen) it ended with the main character triumphantly holding a glowing thing for the camera to fly around. (In The Rock it was a green flare, in Transformers it is a box of some sort. Don’t ask.)

What’s annoying is that there was one brief spark where I thought the movie might be kinda good – with the robots talking about Ebay and stepping in Mom’s rosebushes. This almost-joke is played out, though, over and over. Beaten to death and shot from seven hundred angles and hammered again and again. And that, in a nutshell, is this movie.

I can’t lie, though — I like that the kid is wearing a Strokes T-Shirt. I don’t know which is more awesome, that the producers thought it would be cool for him to wear that shirt, or that The Strokes agreed to it.