Transformers: Why can't I stop watching?

(I'm going to revive this blog by expanding it. It won't just be about video games anymore. It will also be about nerdy pop culture, such as movies, TV shows, and the people like myself whose lives revolve around it.)

So I just saw the latest Transformers movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction.

What else can I say that the movie reviewers haven't already said so far? Rotten Tomatoes currently has a 17% rating on the movie. Most people say the movie sucked. Fans of the Transformers franchise will continue to complain about how Michael Bay is ruining everything just for money.

And yes, the movie was loud, full of action, light on plot, corny, and overly long.

But why do I keep watching? I'll get to that, but first, I'll just touch upon a few things that were wrong with the movie. (Minor spoiler alert, but I promise it will be minor.)

Optimus Prime: You got the touch ... no more

If you thought he was pissed in #3, wait til you see him now.

Yep, once again they took the iconic Optimus Prime, who represented everything that is noble, courageous, and downright awesome in an Autobot, and made him so aggressive, he's bordering on psychopathic. Yeah, I get that he's been through a lot, as the movie's plot unfolded, but am I supposed to feel sympathy for him? I can't since the Michael Bay movies never seem to give the Transformers themselves more than token personalities. That makes it hard for me to really respect him as a protagonist.

The other Autobots, as usual, were just props without much personality. Except for Hound, whose brash war veteran shtick I kind of liked. They also had a Japanese Autobot named Drift. You know he's Japanese because he looks like a samurai, talks like a samurai (complete with the Asian stereotypical accent), and fights like a samurai. (He was voiced by Ken Watanabe, though, which was good.)

And of course, they still had Bumblebee, only without Shia LeBeouf this time, so it feels like something was missing there. (Though the absence of LeBeouf is kind of welcome this time around. He was good in the first movie, but beyond that he became less and less tolerable.)

Then of course there were the Dinobots, which were finally introduced in this movie. They were OK, in my opinion, but they had even less personality than the original cartoon series, and that says a lot. They also just kind of haphazardly came into the picture without much storyline build-up, but hey, who watches the Transformers movies for deep plot?

Another grand conspiracy

Sector 7, from the first movie: The truth is out there

Once again, they took a phenomenon that happened on Earth, namely the extinction of dinosaurs, and tied it to some grand conspiracy that was committed by the Transformers eons ago.

OK, but the first movie supposedly had the Transformers looking all over the galaxy for the Allspark, which meant that its resting place, namely planet Earth, was just some random planet to them. But then, surprise! The second movie reveals that the Transformers visited Earth a long time ago because they were seeking energy. Then the third movie had something to do with a discovery of a Transformers vessel on the dark side of the moon.

See where I'm going here? The Transformers have been to Earth so many times throughout history, we might as well claim that every major event in the history of planet Earth was somehow the responsibility of the Transformers. The Ice Age, the Mayans, Atlantis, they're all the work of the Transformers, right? Who knows? Maybe global warming is just a nefarious plot by the Decepticons to get rid of humanity. It's getting old, these conspiracy theories.

Humans flying through the air ... again

From Transformers 3: Remember all of the skyscraper acrobatics?

Again, we see humans flying through the air, only to be caught and rescued in mid-flight by the heroic Autobots. Michael Bay EXPLOSIONS! all around them, shrapnel flying, robots crashing into each other, all while the poor humans are being held in their grasp and somehow surviving all of the jostling and the flak with maybe a scratch or two.

I guess it wouldn't be a Bayformers movie without flying humans, but come on, can we get something different to keep the action and the thrills going? We can't keep getting the same old same old if you want us to continue suspending disbelief.

There are many other faults with the movie, but that should be enough for now.

And yet, I still watch

That says it all ...

So why can't I stop watching? Why did I pay frickin' $14.50 to watch the movie in 3D? (And why did I pay an astounding $10 for popcorn and Coke, which will end up as tasty but empty calories anyway?)

Because it's Transformers. Because I grew up with them as a kid. Because they're giant robots, led by a living truck with the voice that we all know and love. Because they transform, and that's SO COOL. I mean, whenever I see the Autobots rolling down the highway, I always get a warm feeling inside knowing that the good guys, all 100 tons of them, are coming into the scene, and they are going to save humanity from the evil and seemingly unstoppable Decepticons.

But I continue to watch mostly because it's wonderful escapism. There are hardly better ways to spend three hours of my life than to get away from work (which has been consuming my nights and weekends as of late), forget about that damned leg injury that is affecting my marathon training, forget about all of the anxieties as the father of an unborn son, and watch giant transforming robots go at it in the middle of densely populated cities such as Chicago and Hong Kong.

And when I finally came out of the movie theater, I looked at my watch and discovered that three hours had indeed gone by without me realizing it at all. Though the movie was long, the fact that it didn't feel long to me says something about how much I enjoyed the ride.

So yeah, that's why I'll continue to feed money into the whole Bayformers nonsense, which will probably mean that we'll see more, and the flaws will continue to be magnified, and the Transformers franchise will continue to be distorted in ways that we fanboys will complain about to no satisfactory end. And given that this latest Transformers movie has already made $400 million in its first weekend alone, I'm not the only one.

Kudos to the new cast

"OH MY GOD!!!" - The poor guy on the right

I must say that Mark Walberg, Stanley Tucci, and Kelsey Grammer alll turned in pretty good performances for a movie like this. It was a smart decision to retire Shia LeBeouf and John Turturro from the line of movies and bring in a new cast that bumps up the maturity by half a step. That's not to say that they didn't have to recite corny lines and make the best out of a script written by rank amateurs, but their acting skills were good enough to make up for the flaws in writing and characterization.

Li Bingbing on a promotional poster for the Chinese audience

(By the way, I thought the Chinese girl in this movie was the same one that played Blink in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but I was wrong. The former is Li Bingbing, but the latter is Fan Bingbing. Same first name and very similar facial features, but different actresses nonetheless.)