Current Reads

In between bouts of other equally distracting entertainment I am currently reading: -

Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

About a third of the way through the audiobook version. Great story so far, quite different to what I usually read.

Hilldiggers - Neal Asher

I've generally gotten bored of sci-fi in general, so am finding myself skipping through a lot. I'm near the end - I like Asher's sense of humour that runs through his writing. His take on AI and his vision of The Polity is quite intruiging.

Transformers review

Transformers – The Movie

*** out of Five

Let’s be under no misunderstanding here. This movie is designed for one thing and one thing only: to sell you, the moviegoer, the concept that everything up there on the screen is for sale at your nearest available toy store.

The movie is nothing more than 244 minutes of product placement on behalf of Hasbro in the form of a passable, frenetic action movie that struggles from the constraints placed upon it by a distinct lack of depth in the plot. What saves the movie is the remarkable special effects, a capable turn by teen protagonist Shia LeBeouf (of the equally plot malnourished Disturbia) and a general willingness by Director Michael Bay to not get overly serious about the whole shebang.

Bay is the perfect Director for this; full on action, one-liners, helicopters framed in bright Californian sun and super-dooper slow motion during the big fights as if to say ‘check this out – impressive CG, non?’.

And the CG is impressive, overwhelmingly so. Once you’ve watched perfectly rendered robots fight for an hour you begin to forget to be wowed, and then the critical faculty begins to kick in. For one thing the robots are both too complicated (watch when Optimus Prime transforms for the first time into his robotic form – so much is moving and transforming that your brain begins to lurk at the back of your head like a frightened puppy) and yet they are stubbornly close to their toy counterparts, daubed in bright primary colours that is at complete contracts to the 25 foot high metallic killing machines. So whilst cars, people and scenery are thrown around and generally demolished with exhilarating frequency, you still can’t get over the fact that these are still toys, not robots from space. It’s like the UN sending in Tanks painted in lime green and orange.

The story itself is a sponsored by back of fags production, but all the same it’s very hard to be critical on a movie that never was going to be anything else other than an orgy of non-stop CG destruction involving massive missile firing robots. It helps that Bay attempts to interject humour into almost every human scene, ably supported by the cast, mainly LeBeouf, followed by a quirky, nonsensical (yet underused) John Turturro and an always game John Voight.

It could be said that the most satisfying thing about Transformers is that it is a capable movie, is able to raise the requisite laughs, looks pretty and delivers the audience pretty much what it expects. Hasbro will sleep easy, knowing their franchise will continue into Transformers 2 and beyond, but it will be interesting to see if Bay – should he pick up the mantle – can pull off the same parlour trick twice.