Jumping The Sharkticon: Five Reasons Why Transformers Needs a Reboot

So Michael Bay's giant effing robot finale Transformers: Dark of the Moon is about to drop on Bluray. While not anywhere near as bad as Revenge of the Fallen, is still a big bloated mess. Hasbro and the movie's producers are no doubt planning their franchise's next move and they have pretty much indicated that they will continue the existing story and not do any kind of a reboot, which is sad because I remain convinced that a good Transformers movie can be made. According to the producers, if it's not broke (i.e. unprofitable) then don't fix it.

Well, producers, here are five good reasons to reboot:

1. Robots in Disguise?

The central appeal of Transformers is that it features robots that secretly live among us disguised as vehicles and other everyday devices. In the Michael Bay Transformers continuity, there is no longer any need for the Cybertronians to be in disguise. Their existence is a badly kept secret as they have a habit of getting into huge brawls in the middle of heavily populated cities and have tried to destroy the Earth twice, even broadcasting their existence on TV in Revenge of the Fallen. At this point, there is not really any reason for them to even have vehicle modes, which negates the whole Transformers concept. They might as well call the fourth movie Monoformers: Robots in the Open. Reboot.

2. The "Narrative" Has Painted Itself Into A Corner

Michael Bay probably wasn't overly concerned about a fourth movie in which he was not going to participate. His sole concern was to conclude his trilogy in the biggest loudest, trilogy-endingist way possible, and to that extent, he succeeded. So where do you go from a movie that destroyed a major American city, killed off one of the central characters and the main villain of the entire series? What's that, you say? Unicron? Personally, I am not excited about the prospect of a live-action Transformers: The Movie. Reboot.

3. Rebooting Is The Transformers Way

Transformers has survived for over quarter century through clever management by Hasbro, who have been savvy enough to re-invent the series on a regular basis. The property is constantly evolving, taking the best elements of previous continuities and media and constantly refining itself into something better. Michael Bay's Transformers is not even close to being the best incarnation of the franchise. I'd love to see a Transformers movie that incorporates some characters and story points from Beast Wars or Transformers Animated. Reboot

4. Save Yourselves Some Money

Hire a young director with a passion for the franchise and a background in effects and storytelling and a cast of unknowns who will work for cheap. Please don't hire a mini-Bay like Brett Ratner to crank out the same kind of movie.

Save some effects money by simplifing the overly-complicated robot designs. A good middle ground between the simple G1 characters and the movie designs is the new Transformers: Prime series. It's time for a new aesthetic for the movies, in which robot characters are so complicated that they are often indistinguishable from one another. There's no reason for the Cybertronians to be hyper-realistic and made of tens of thousands of visible moving pieces.

My last money saving tip: don't hire anyone who is going to push you into a three hour movie. The last two Transformers movies were each at least an hour too long. These are summer popcorn movies and should be no more than 1:45 minutes.

5. This Is An Opportunity To Make A Real Transformers Movie

I realize that the first movie was a risky venture. Doing a movie based on an 1980's cartoon and toyline could very easily have been a huge laughable failure. From that point of view, hiring someone like Michael Bay was smart. He brought a glossy and cool sensibility to the movies that appealed to the young male demographic but he was certainly no fan of the property. I always got the impression that he thought he was slumming with the nerds and that he was overcompensating the cool factor because he was working on decidedly geeky and kid-oriented franchise. The tone and style of his movies is very different from previous Transformers media. After all, Michael Bay makes movies about cool guys and hot chicks chasing cars and blowing stuff up, not sci-fi nerd opuses or kids movies.

Now that Transformers is a viable movie franchise you can take the risk of making a movie more true to the heart of the property. There's no longer any need to tart it up to sell tickets, people are going to be buying tickets to the next couple of Transformers movies no matter what you do but by choosing to reboot and make good movies you can have a long healthy cinematic franchise. At it's heart, Transformers has always been aimed at kids. Don't be afraid to make a really good kids movie that grown-ups will enjoy. Sure, some kids liked Michael Bay's movies too, but they probably needed a Ritalin feed during the movie.

Finally, the second two Transformers movies were crap. It's no secret. Sure, you can make a lot of money cranking out crappy movies but sooner or later people are going to catch on and that is bad for the longevity of the franchise. So Michael Bay has finished his trilogy and you now have the opportunity to say "Thank you very much for helping us create a viable movie series" and start fresh on a brand new trilogy of movies with a new director and a fresh take on the characters, story and design.

Patrick Garone
Follow Me On Twitter
Author of City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Monster Movie of the Week: Liquid Metal Edition: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

While the original Terminator was a sleeper hit that found its audience on home video and cable, its first sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was a summer movie juggernaut that catapulted director James Cameron to the level of moguls like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The movie's huge success gave Cameron the clout to undertake massive productions like Titanic and Avatar.

By the time T2 went into production, Arnold Schwarzenegger had become an unlikely superstar and was making plenty of his own action vehicles. In retrospect, he hardly needed to make a sequel to a movie in which he was a glorified stuntman but his role in Terminator 2 was expanded and in the sequel he played a cyborg that had been reprogrammed and sent back in time to defend a preteen John Connor from another more advanced Terminator model. It was a more heroic role and more in keeping with his new status as the biggest movie star in the world. T2 ended up being one of his most popular movies and represented the height of his action career.

But most importantly, Terminator 2 features groundbreaking digital effects that allowed Cameron to pull off mind bending sequences that simply would not have been possible before. The movie is an important milestone in the history of film making and visual effects. The effects in T2 represent a maturation of technology that had been around throughout the 1980's but which Cameron had nurtured until they were ready for his eye-popping liquid metal T-1000.

Cameron's previous movie, The Abyss, had featured a similar but much less ambitious effect in its shimmering, shape-shifting aliens that appeared to be made entirely out of water. Terminator 2 creates a character that is not only made entirely of a liquid metal but also successfully melds it into the performance of a human actor, Robert Patrick. It was a successful first attempt at a CGI creature that not only paved the way for both the photo-realistic dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the hybrid CGI/human performances in such movies as Lord of the Rings and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Shiny deadly people!

While the Terminator 2 is a historically important movie for its many technical achievements and it is one of the greatest action movies of the 1990's, it does have a few flaws that keep it from greatness.

One of the strengths of the original Terminator was that despite the hard logic of the time-travel paradox at the heart of its plot, Terminator was a simple story of fear and pursuit. It was like the elemental nightmare about being pursued by some relentless enemy. It was a lean and mean action movie. By contrast, T2 is overly elaborate and, at 137 minutes, it is at least a half-hour too long.

Many of us can remember a time when a movie being over two hours long was an unusual thing, reserved for "serious" movies. James Cameron has done more to usher in the era of bloated 2hr+ behemoths than anyone else. Aliens (though one of my favorite films) also clocked in at 137 and is (arguably) a little bit too long. 1989's The Abyss plods along at 138 minutes. Cameron was a superstar director by the time his spy movie True Lies was released in 1994, at that one clocks in at 141 minutes. By 1998, Cameron released the famously lengthy Titanic, which was two VHS tapes and 194 minutes long, the effect of which is like being forced to sit in a movie theater and watch a miniseries. Cameron spent the next ten years developing new technologies that would allow him make long movies and came up with Avatar, which, shamefully, is not even three hours long.

James Cameron's need to cram his entire intact cinematic vision into overly-long, sprawling movies is the sign of a director who has way too much power and too few people telling him "no." This is a too-common problem in today's movie industry. Too many directors are treated like auteurs which gives us long and meandering Star Wars prequels (with twenty minute pod race sequences), a two and a half hour Transformers movie, and a King Kong movie that was over three hours long. I would love to go back to the era when a good solid action film is an hour and a half long, like Terminator. Brevity is a terrific quality in an action movie.



One of the most notable things going between 1984's The Terminator to 1991's Terminator 2 is the strange shift in tone. While the original movie had a few tender moments, it was a dark and fatalistic 1980's action movie. T2, on the other hand, ventures into almost touchy-feely 1990's territory, with its subplot about a grating and adolescent John Connor befriending the Terminator sent back to protect him. It also features many light-hearted "comic" moments in an attempt to keep it in line with the softer direction that Schwarzenegger had taken with his career by this point. While the original Terminator was stone-faced, silent, and deadly, this new Terminator smiles, cracks jokes, struts around to "Bad to the Bone" and complains that he he needs "a vacation." When Schwarzenegger spouts the infamously awful line, "Now I know why you cry," I kinda wished his younger, eyebrow-less self would have shown up to shoot him in the face with his laser-sighted pistol. The movie is rated R but feels much more like a hard PG-13. I'd wager the R has more to do with the liberal use of the word "fuck" than the actual violence. Terminator 2 only works as well as it does because the T-1000 is lethal enough to make up for the Schwarzenegger's new cuddlier Terminator.

Terminator's right eye is being grossly unprofessional and looking straight into the camera.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

So, apparently they only make a few models of Terminator and a lot of them look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This one goes up against the T-1000 and gets beat up pretty bad so there are some nice damage effects later in the movie, although there are some wonky metal applications to fleshy parts of the body and Terminator's robot eye suspiciously stops moving as soon as it is revealed.

If endoskeletons are your thing, there is a cool sequence early in the movie that shows a whole squad of them marching into battle. I'm glad we get to see these bad boys in action cause I always liked their demonic robot/skeleton appearance.

The real star is the awesome liquid metal T-1000, a mind-bending creation of James Cameron and probably the most unique and interesting robot in the history of Science Fiction. Let's face it, there is not a lot of novelty or originality in the film industry, but the T-1000 actually presented audiences with something that they had likely never seen or even imagined before: a beautiful quicksilver being that could assume almost any form and for whom the normal rules of combat do not apply. The T-1000 was certainly not going to be stopped by being crushed in a press, that's for sure. It had to be frozen, melted, blown up and pushed into a vat of molten steel in order to be destroyed.

T-1000 has his own brand of liquid metal martial arts and adds an unpredictable element to the usual tired action movie fight sequences. In hand-to-hand combat, he does cool and surprising stuff like when he is slammed face-first into a wall, his back morphs into his front or when punched in the face, his head suddenly changes into his hands. When shot, T-1000 actually shows the ballistic damage on his body, most often in the form of shining metallic craters but when he takes higher caliber damage, his body blows apart in weird and surreal ways that are almost reminiscent of the shape shifting alien from The Thing.

Finally, the T-1000 is a smarter and more ruthless Terminator than any other. He's also a bit of a bastard, such as when he tortures Sarah Connor to get her to call out to her son. Or when after Connor fails to shoot him off a ledge and into a vat of molten steel he responds with a chilling finger wag. This Terminator, fortunately, will never know why we cry.




MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

When the T-1000 is finally dispatched, the liquid metal robot flails around in the molten steel, reverting back to the forms it had taken over the course of the movie and then finally into a variety of surreal quasi-human screaming forms before he becomes a just a screaming face that folds out of itself and then just a mask that dissolves in the steel. It may be a little The Mind's Eye but it is still pretty cool.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

T2 is widely available in both DVD and BluRay in many different editions. Most of which feature a longer director's cut of the movie that actually restores a few interesting scenes. There is an interesting scene in which John and Sarah actually access the Terminator's chip and switch it to "read" mode allowing him more independent thought and the ability to learn, presumably about feelings and crying. There are also a couple of scenes featuring the T-1000 in which we see him glitching after having been frozen in the liquid nitrogen and reconstituted. We see him flickering and inadvertently mimicking colors and textures around him.

One downside to seeing the movies on home video and a big TV is that you notice the shockingly awful stunt doubling, such as the apparently 40-year-old man doubling for John Connor and the not-quite-Schwarzenegger Terminator double.


TRAILER





Patrick Garone
Follow Me On Twitter
Author of City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Monster Movie of the Week: The Wolf Man (2010)

THE WOLF MAN
Directed by Joe Johnston
Genre: Gothic Horror

THE MOVIE

The Wolf Man doesn't know quite what it wants to be. At it's heart, it longs to be a faithful re-invention of the classic Universal movie starring Lon Cheney,Jr. or possibly an elegant neo-Gothic period film a la Bram Stoker's Dracula, or maybe a Hammer-style horror movie, but in a world of Twilight, Underworld, and meddling studio executives there was probably intense pressure to make it, if not hip, than at least intense and violent enough to be able to appeal to a good chunk of youngsters. It was a troubled production with too many cooks in the kitchen and when the always-reliable Joe Johnston came on to direct, the movie had already picked up its own clunky momentum.

The movie stars Oscar winner Benicio Del Toro as the cursed Lawrence Talbot, in a bit of casting that is interesting but not quite right. In some ways Del Toro has the same kind of world-weary, hang-dog quality that Lon Cheney, Jr brought to the role, but he seems uncomfortable with the language and out-of-place in the Victorian period. Whether this is due to his acting or simply a badly-written script, I'm not sure, but I never quite bought him as the famous Shakespearean actor who returns home from America to his English country manor after his brother is violently killed.

The great Anthony Hopkins plays his father, the lord of the estate, who knows more than he is letting on about the attacks. Talbot has an uneasy relationship with his father, who he remembers standing over the body of his Gypsy mother when he was a boy. In The Wolfman and Thor, it seems Hopkins is making a career out of playing fathers with violent or stormy relationships with their sons.

When Talbot goes to visit the local Gypsies, he is cryptically told that his brother had been possessed by a "great evil." He then witnesses another attack on the camp by a wolf-like creature. Lawrence is bitten in the attack and, as anyone who has ever seen a werewolf movie before knows, he gets the werewolf's curse.

Lawrence eventually ends up in an asylum in London, in a sequence that really showcases the brutality visited upon mental patients during that period. To cure him of his werewolf delusions, he is strapped down during the full moon in full view of a group of doctors and students, where he transforms into a werewolf and escapes to the country for a final confrontation with his father.

The Wolf Man won an Academy Award for its make-up effects by Rick Baker, who is no stranger to werewolf effects, having done the great An American Werewolf in London many years before. Where the movie really shines is its really beautiful cinematography and art direction, which capture a perfect mood of Gothic horror. From the dilapidated country estate house on the foggy moor, to gas-lit nights of Industrial Age London, The Wolf Man is appropriately dark and moody.




THE MONSTER/EFFECTS

While I am not anti-CGI at all, I feel like werewolf movies are less fun in the era of digital effects. With movies like An American Werewolf in London, or The Howling, there was a real sense of ingenuity to the special effects. Effects artist were using all of the tools at their disposal to try and deliver amazing and ground breaking transformation sequences and creatures. Nowadays, effects artists are limited only by their imaginations and budgets and that often makes for uninspired creature designs.

In its werewolf design The Wolf Man seems to be trying to have it both ways. It seems to want to have an old-school Universal Wolf Man but, it also knows we expect a little more from our werewolves than a very hairy guy with fangs. I have a feeling this was one of the difficulties of getting this movie made, trying to create a design that is recognizably Wolf Man but still up to modern standards of design and special effects. The result, for me, is not that satisfying, but then I like my werewolves more wolf than man.



HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Widely available on DVD and Bluray with lots of special features that document the production and the make-up. Baker and the other filmmakers seem to take pleasure in pointing out how happy they were when Del Toro was cast in the role because they were "already half way there," and how it wouldn't take that much make-up to transform him into the Wolf Man. Ouch.



MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

The whole sequence in the asylum really stands out as a graphic example of the barbaric treatment of the mentally ill during the time period. Lawrence is subject to electrotherapy and basically being water boarded as part of his "treatment." This might be the only time in the movie that it achieves anything like real horror.


TRAILER








Patrick Garone
Follow Me On Twitter
Author of City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Monster Movie of the Week: District 9 (2009)

DISTRICT 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Genre: Science fiction/Body Horror/Action

THE MOVIE

A sleeper hit back in 2009, District 9 stands out as one of the best science fiction films of the naughts, with great special effects and performances as well as thought provoking themes that, like many of the greatest sci-fi films, feature a veiled social commentary. This movie was so well-received that it was even nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, which is a rare feat for a genre movie like this.

District 9 was produced by filmmaker Peter Jackson and helmed by first-time director Neill Blomkamp. The two had originally teamed up to make a movie adaptation of the popular video game Halo but after that project fell through, the commenced work on a project that Blomkamp had been thinking about for a while, a story set in an alien refugee camp in South Africa, which would be an expansion of his 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg.



District 9 quickly establishes a faux-documentary style (which it abandons when convenient) and introduces its protagonist, the feckless bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe, who comes across as an Afrikaner version of Michael Scott from The Office. The movie uses "archival footage" to show the aftermath of the arrival of a massive alien ship over Johannesburg and how humanity had cut its way into the vessel to find a population of starving insect-like beings, who were eventually relocated to District 9, which has become a squalid shanty town by the beginning of the movie.


Wikus is tasked by the giant multinational company that operates District 9 to obtain signatures so that there can be some semblance of legality when the aliens are forcibly relocated to District 10, a new, more prison-like settlement. The aliens, who are referred to as Prawns by the humans, are largely considered of sub-human intelligence (it is speculated by the humans that they were the ship's workers and subservient to another group of aliens, unseen in the movie) and are mostly uneducated and easily manipulated (they have a strange obsession with catfood). However, the movie soon introduces us to the alien known as Christopher Johnson and his young son. Christopher, unlike most of the other aliens, can read and reason and has been toiling away on a secret project involving a mysterious cylinder filled with an unknown substance.

When Wikus comes across this cylinder while doing his rounds, it sprays him in the face and initiates a transformation that recalls that of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Wikus' hand suddenly begins to change into something resembling one of the prawns and he soon finds himself on the run from the government and his former corporate employers. He turns to the only place where he can hide: District 9.

Arriving at the shack of Christopher Johnson, Wikus learns that the cylinder is the missing component of the long lost command capsule that will allow Johnson to return to the alien ship and escape from the Earth with his son. He also promises that, once on the ship, he will be able to treat Wikus and reverse his transformation.

Needless to say, things don't go as planned. District 9 really kicks up the action in its last act, almost jarringly so for those who had been previously invested in the movie's heavy themes and interesting characters. The ending is fairly open-ended, and there's plenty of room for a sequel or two. District 9 is a great movie, although there are some story things that don't make a whole lot of sense, like who being sprayed in the face with fuel would change one into a totally different species or the mysterious disappearance of the beings that were actually running the ship, conveniently leaving behind these "primitive" creatures or how the alien ship is not crawling with human technicians when Johnson arrives on it.

The movie takes what could have been a very heavy handed analogy-the Prawns as proxies for black South Africans during apartheid-and deftly creates a story that stands on its own but feels very rooted in our world. Like the fantastic Alfonso Cuaron movie, Children of Men or Duncan Jones' amazing Moon, District 9, takes the world that we live in, adds a sci-fi premise and extrapolates a believable future from it. Corporate exploitation, poverty, tribalism, these things are all fodder for District 9 and, even without the inconsistent documentary style, make it feel like something that could actually happen.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

Where the movie really shines is the realization of the prawns both in design and characterization. Despite the fact that he is a revolting bug moo-cap creature, I actually found myself deeply invested in Christopher and by the end of the movie I was very concerned about his fate. His relationship with his small son is quite touching and provides a nice emotional hook allowing the audience to empathize for the rather alien-looking prawns.



Designwise, the prawns are pretty good creatures and mostly avoid the "Cloverfield trap" of creature design, which is to make monsters into incomprehensible wasp-waisted hodgepodges of different scary animals. The prawns are a pretty coherent design and not overly complicated, so that you can take a quick look at them and understand how they work. They are bipedal insectoids, seemingly with a chitinous exoskeleton, and generally of human height or taller.

They possess a pair of large antennae on their heads which are covered in movable plate-like scales, which allow them a good amount of recognizable facial expression. Unlike most arthropods, they posses lensed eyes with a distinct pupil, a design decision that makes them easier to relate to than, say, more bug-like compound eyes. Instead of jaws or mandibles, they have a set of short tentacle-like organs that presumably hang in front of their mouths. The prawns do not speak English in the movie but in their own alien language of clicking sounds. Their dialogue is subtitled for the audience and understood by the human characters who are trained to interact with them.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

During the movie's climax, there is a harrowing sequence in which Christopher Johnson has to race to the crashed command capsule where his son is waiting for him. By this point, I was so invested in this relationship that I was practically cheering for him to get to his son in one piece. And I really hate bugs.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

District 9 is widely available on DVD and Bluray. The Bluray transfer is really nice and brings out a ton of detail, really showing this movie off in its squalid glory. The movie has also been available on-and-off for Netflix streaming.

SEE ALSO

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) is another tale of man's relationship to a mistreated, non-human "other" which also features amazing mo-cap/CGI characters that are far more compelling than the humans in the movie.

THE TRAILER




Patrick Garone
Follow Me On Twitter
Author of City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Monster Movie of the Week: Cowabunga Edition! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (1990)

Directed by: Steve Barron

Genre: Superhero/Martial Arts

THE MOVIE

Having been a kid in the 1980’s as part of the Star Wars/GI Joe/Tranformers/He-Man generation, I narrowly missed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze which began with a series of edgy and satirical comic books and carried over into a cheesy cartoon show, toy line, and video game series, all of which exploded in the late 1980's. The movie came at the height of the Turtles phenomenon and was a big hit and, for a time, the highest grossing independent film. It can also be argued that it helped to repopularize the martial arts movie as a genre (as did Mortal Kombat five years later) because in 1990 it would have been unthinkable to have a foreign language martial arts movie showing in wide release and now it’s not uncommon.

The movie takes a tone that is more in line with the comic book than the cartoons and is actually fairly violent for a PG movie. It has a very gritty early 1990's feel, and many scenes take place on dark and wet New York streets full of crime and delinquents. Also typical for the time are the many sinister Japanese accented-characters ("We've been rooking for you, Mss. O'Neir.") as the early 1990's was the heyday of Japan-ophobia in American popular culture.

It is the origin story of the Turtles, four mutant turtle brothers who have been trained as crime fighting ninjas by their mutant rat master, Splinter. The Turtles are caught up in a crime wave brought about by an organization called the Foot Clan, headed by a man named Shredder. Also mixed up in the story is a reporter named April O’Neil and a sports equipment-wielding vigilante called Casey Jones, played by the great character actor Elias Koteas.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

Creature-wise the movie features the four Turtles and Splinter, all created by Jim Henson Studios and are nicely done with very expressive animatronic faces. When you think about it, the amount of martial arts is very impressive considering the bulky costumes. Unfortunately, the Turtles are only really distinguished by the color of their ninja masks and their weapons. With the exception of the bad-ass Raphael and possibly Michelangelo (who speaks in a grating "Valley Dude" style that has not aged well) they are not very well distinguished from one another as characters either via performance or design. The Splinter puppet, however, is quite nicely designed and looks as life like as an aged anthropomorphic rat can.

SEQUELS

There were two direct sequels to the live action movie (of descending quality) and the recent TMNT which is a CGI film in the same continuity as the live action films.

MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE

The Casey Jones/Raphael fight. Although, the sequence of the pre-mutant Splinter practicing martial arts in his cage is memorable for being totally ridiculous.

HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY

Widely available in a no frills DVD release. Also as part of a Bluray set with its sequels, although missing the extra features one would expect.

TRAILER

TRIVIA

Actor Sam Rockwell appears in an early role as one of the teenagers working in the Foot Headquarters.