More Than Meets the Eye
A live-action Transformers movie? What fantastic news. The original, cartoon Transformers movie, the one with Unicron, Galvatron and the death of Optimus Prime, remains one of my favorite movies. I look forward excitedly to the Dreamworks effort.
If I may register a modest dissent from Airdog, who first brought this to my attention, I'm not sure this is an overdue development. I think now is the right time. If they'd made a live-action movie about giant transforming robots back in the late nineties, the movie would have stunk. The effects-technology wasn't sufficiently developed at the time; the giant robots would have looked ridiculous (if you can believe that!). More importantly, the expectations of quality from superhero/sci-fi/fantasy/cartoon movies was far, far lower then. Movies of that sort were expected to be a little campy, poorly plotted, with some crazy costumes, lousy acting and one or two "exciting" set-piece action scenes. Batman was the exception; Batman & Robin was the rule. In the last 5 years or so, this "bigotry of low expectations" has largely eroded. There've been a number of genuinely high quality superhero or fantasy movies made since 2000. The Lord of the Rings series, the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, Hellboy, among others. Sure, they still make lousy movies of this sort, but there are lame movies from all genres. The point is that it's been shown that you can make sci-fi/superhero/fantasy movies that aren't terrible.
If I may register a modest dissent from Airdog, who first brought this to my attention, I'm not sure this is an overdue development. I think now is the right time. If they'd made a live-action movie about giant transforming robots back in the late nineties, the movie would have stunk. The effects-technology wasn't sufficiently developed at the time; the giant robots would have looked ridiculous (if you can believe that!). More importantly, the expectations of quality from superhero/sci-fi/fantasy/cartoon movies was far, far lower then. Movies of that sort were expected to be a little campy, poorly plotted, with some crazy costumes, lousy acting and one or two "exciting" set-piece action scenes. Batman was the exception; Batman & Robin was the rule. In the last 5 years or so, this "bigotry of low expectations" has largely eroded. There've been a number of genuinely high quality superhero or fantasy movies made since 2000. The Lord of the Rings series, the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, Hellboy, among others. Sure, they still make lousy movies of this sort, but there are lame movies from all genres. The point is that it's been shown that you can make sci-fi/superhero/fantasy movies that aren't terrible.
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