The web has been a-twitter with wailing and gnashing of teeth since was announced as the director of .
He faced a seemingly insurmountable task: satisfy the desires of hoards of geeks and nerds, many of whom had an over-developed sense of pride in the memory of a TV show which was made to sell toys.
Lest anyone think I’m pointing fingers at others, let me “out” myself. I had all, or almost all, of the Transformers toys, including the now-goofy “stick several Transformers together to make one giant Transformer.” My son is still playing with one of them. I watched the TV show.
I, too, was afraid that the Transformers movie would do to that memory what had been done to the Fantastic Four with the first movie (the second was OK), Daredevil, Elektra (what a waste of Jennifer Garner in her prime), and that gawd-awful, what-the-bleepity-bleep-happened-to-this-movie? called (by far the worst of the bunch. Absolute trash).
About 90 minutes into the Transformers movie, I typed out a message on my phone and handed it to Tracey to read:
This is the best (*!&#@ movie ever!
Except that I didn’t use the random punctuation.
Ok, now after a day to think it over, I realize that The Godfather was probably a better movie, and there are probably some others too — but, BUT! of the memories-of-my-youth-made-into-movies, Transformers ranks near the top of the list. (Spider-Man was good, but I’m still annoyed that Peter Parker had the ability to shoot webs from his — where, exactly? Wrists? — as opposed to the original, where he had to use his brains and make the web, and he had a finite amount of it.)
Transformers was amazing. See it on the big screen. See it more than once. Be amazed at how seamless the CGI melds with real life. Heck, see it to be amazed at how much 21-year-old really didn’t look like any girl you went to high school with, nor does she look like a high school aged girl, and yet you don’t really care.
But after you see it, you — all of you, especially the Michael Bay haters — need to suck it up and say it: That was an awesome action adventure movie, and Bay did a great job with it.