29th June 2009

THUD WALLOP BOOM BOOM CRASH WALLOP BANG BANG THUD WALLOP KABOOOOOOM!

It's now the summer blockbuster season and the parade of major studio offerings has started. Coming up are the new Harry Potter movie, Land of the Lost, Antichrist and GI Joe. (Well, maybe not Antichrist.) But the season has started with two vaguely similar yet at the same time slightly different movies consisting mainly of large metal things smashing into each other. Transfomers: Revenge Of The Fallen is noisy, painfully long, bloated, entirely devoid of human beings and, despite the sound and fury, astonishingly dull. At an estimated budget of two hundred million dollars it should have far more going for it than the dazzling computer effects and Megan Fox running around the desert in tight white trousers. For some people, admittedly, that'll be enough. But those are things that should just be incidental pleasures; added extras, the icing on the cake. In Transformers 2 the cake is made solely of icing and it's the size of the Moon. Where's the humanity? Where's the emotion? Surely I should care whether these giant alien robots destroy the Earth, but I don't.

But there's very little in the way of humanity or emotion in Terminator Salvation, and I really enjoyed that - maybe not a great Terminator film (first one classic, second one okay but overblown, third one little more than Big Arnie and Kristanna Loken beating each other up over and over again like it's a Tom and Jerry cartoon) but terrific fun in a soulless kind of way. Are the effects noticeably more dazzling? Not really: at this level of budgetary lunacy they're not going to get any better. Would I have liked the new Transformers film more if I'd seen it before the new Terminator film? In all honesty, probably not, and I don't think I'd have liked Terminator Salvation any less if it had been the second of the year's offerings consisting of large metal things smashing into each other. (To be honest, the absence of Megan Fox in white trousers doesn't make a whit of difference either.)

Maybe it's because Terminator has a pedigree that stems from a genuinely exciting original, and Transformers just has a pedigree that stems from a plastic toy and a cartoon TV show, which I can't take particularly seriously. However, others obviously can. The film's IMDb trivia page shines a light on some, erm, interesting levels of fandom: sample quote "Fans still debate oddities such as Jetfire's name change to Skyfire, and the absence of the Super Valkyrie from the [toy] range for the Macross-derived Robotech (1985). Mercifully, the movie version avoids these headaches [with] an entirely new design based on the real-world SR-71 Blackbird jet." Blimey. It's not an 80s breakfast TV cartoon show for kiddies after all. Apparently it's Sartre.

I don't know that the music scores have much part to play in it either. Along with Linkin Park, Steve Jablonsky scored Transformers and most of what I've heard of his is the standard for modern film music: unmemorable and themeless aural wallpaper. Quite honestly it's hard to tell as the soundtrack is mainly full of sound effects of large metal things smashing into each other, so they could have had anything going on under there. Terminator Salvation is scored by Danny Elfman, of whom I used to be a fan but spent too long working on comicbook superhero movies and Tim Burton films. The album is on Spotify so I'll check it out next week.

Expectations? Many of the first reviews slammed both films pretty equally, (Mark Kermode on FiveLive hated them both) but I actually managed to see Terminator before the main reviews. But my expectations were at their lowest for Transformers and it still didn't exceed them, whereas I was moderately excited at the prospect of a new Terminator movie and it more than satisfied. It can't be because McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol) is a better director than Michael Bay - whatever else Bay might have done, he did direct the first Bad Boys movie which was a profoundly enjoyable if entirely empty film.

One thing that definitely counts against Transformers is running time. At a ridiculous hundred and fifty minutes, it takes over half an hour more than Terminator Salvation does. And length isn't everything. A lot of stuff could be lost from Transformers, specifically the terrible, time-wasting comedy relief. The whole Mother-on-drugs sequence is just embarrassing and just pads the film out. I'd also nominate the early Shanghai sequence in which the good robots manage to defeat the bad robots but lay waste to half the city while they're at it. It's like the opening of Team America: World Police where the American military destroy most of Paris and its populace, but the mission is regarded as a success since the half dozen terrorists also got killed - hurrah for that and sorry about the Arc de Triomphe. (Actually the whole thing about the US military keeping the good robots for their own uses just reminded me of Monsters Vs Aliens.)

So I'm not entirely sure why one movie about large metal things smashing into each other rates quite highly and the other doesn't. On the star ratings scale (five stars for Blade Runner, one star for Mutiny On The Buses) Terminator earns a four and Transformers just scrapes a two. And I suspect it wouldn't even have managed that without the distracting white trousers.

Until the next time.

Richard.

© London FrightFest Ltd. 2000-2009
_____________________________________________________________________________________