Transformers

This weekend, my wife and I saw Transformers at the Jamsil theater. (If you're in Korea, don't go there -- COEX is way nicer.)

For a kid who grew up on the old Transformers cartoon, I have to day I was pleased. The casting was good. Bernie Mac as the used car salesman was great, as were Shia Laboeuf and Johnny Knoxville. In fact, I was really happy to see Knoxville in his first serious role.

Of course it was brilliant they got the original voice actor for Optimus Prime, and I liked the way they alluded to the TV series here and there. "More than meets the eye" comes up several times; in the end it's applied to humans. Prime's characteristic "covered mouth" thing came out in the final battle scene, and though Bumblebee was a yellow Camaro (not a Beetle), I noticed a '71 model also sitting in the lot.

Things I didn't like include the weak background story. They should have kept with the "refugees fleeing from a dying world" story -- the "spark" thing was just silly. Minor characters are mostly ignored. Jazz, the "token black Autobot," was the only good guy expendable enough to die.

And the idea that Megatron would be rendered immobile by freezing temperatures in the Arctic is dumb, not to mention that he would be kept in the Hoover Dam by an agency the Secretary of Defense doesn't even know about. Plus, I would have liked to have seen Soundwave -- he really was the best Decepticon.

Oh well. At the very least it's infinitely better than the original, when Hasbro (in a textbook example of corporate greed) killed off everyone in an opening massacre just to introduce the next generation of toys. I'm pretty sure some people got sent to hell over that.

Through its ending and press responses, Hasbro has hinted at a sequel, which might be good. But given that the plot in the first one was weird, I'm afraid that any potential sequel's not going to get any better.