Transformer (2007) – Games Boys Play
During our school days, Doordarshan would show a serial called “Johnny Sakko and his Flying robot”. Big robots would fight for supremacy of Earth. Building would fall like they were made of boards (actually they were made of boards). But it was fun. Then you would re-enact all those moments again after the show. The show’s details were talked with such interest that it felt like it was the biggest event of our life.
Michael Bay directed “Transformer” brings back the same excitement. Ekdum dhisum dhisum aur mast.
Transformer is the story of two robot group, the good Autobots and the evil Decepticons. A talisman or the cube controlling the power of a distant planet finds its way to Earth. The Decepticons lead by the powerful Megatron robot comes to Earth to find the cube. However he crashes into Arctic circle and is frozen. He is found by Captain Archibald Witwicky. Megatron imposes the map of the cube in the spectacle of Witwicky. The Specs are now in the possession of his grandson, Sam. Sam wants to be a cool guy in the school and his dad buys him a car which turns out to be a robot.
Now Sam and the Autobots have to together find the Cube and destroy it before the Megatron de-freezes and along with Deceptions convert all the Earth’s machines into Deceptions and destroy Earth.
The movie is a typical action film where US of America saves Earth from inevitable destruction, always. A similar story to Alien movies like Independence Day or Armageddon (although it was not Alien movie) etc. Based on the Marvel comics series with the same name, its not much of a story here
You have the aliens in the form of robots and you have the good people, the unlikely smartass hero, the sexy heroine who has a past, the pissed government official, the brave soldiers who never get hit by a bullet or firepower and the robots. Everything you need to make a masala Hollywood movie. everything is predictable.
Still its fun and the special effect is what makes the whole thing a treat to watch. The robots being transformed from robots to machine and vice versa. The robot fights, the funny one liners and ofcourse the destruction of buildings. Its like living those childhood fantasy of having those supernatural fights.
The CGI effects are good however I feel there were too many closeup of the robot maybe to avoid showing them shown in full glory. Many times you are not aware what is going on and who is hitting who?
The story is straight forward and nothing new but the execution is fast paced without leaving the viewer any chance to think.
Michael Bay who directed the action movies, Bad Boys and Armageddon make this one more good action flick.
The cast does not have much to do except run around.
Another common aspect of the movie with last week’s “Die Hard 4.0″ was that in both movies, the modern technology fails in both movies. The hero has to resort to old technology. This leads to the question, are we much dependent on technology?
If you like action movies, with good special effects then “Transformer” is good fun.
Rating: 7/10
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
This was a good old pow wow movie. Loved the special effects… the beauty of it was it didn’t look like “animation” at all that one is recently experiencing even in biggies like Spiderman 3, where the experience is a downer when you feel you are watching a cartoon instead of flesh and blood characters/scenes