I'm a geek. But not a sell out.

Well I went to see the new Transformers movie and I must say that I liked it. Liked. Not loved. I attribute most of that like to the fact that I had such low expectations for the movie ever since it rolled into production.

Let me just start by saying that I am a huge Transformers fan. I have been since they first came out. My childhood was The Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, etc...80s classics. I will also say that I have the entire 80 issue run of the Transformers comics, Headmasters miniseries, G.I. Joe/Transformers crossover, Transformers Universe, etc... I will even tell you that I was very excited about and still love to read and re-read the Transformers: Generation 2 series. It was good. They did a great job. So hopefully you can see that I am not a total purist when it comes to the Transformers. I love G1, but I also watched Transformers: Beast Wars (somewhat reluctantly). And naturally, I got caught up in the new Dreamwave TF series, but that died when they crapped out X amount of spin-off titles.

Like most everyone else, when I heard they were doing a live action TF movie I was excited. Who wouldn't be? After a lot of convincing (by myself and others) I decided to not pass judgment until I saw the movie. That was hard, because that meant that I couldn't see or hear anything during the production period. What made it nearly impossible was that a certain individual -cough-Dean-cough- would try to tell me every blasted thing he read on every fansite in the world. So needless to say I did hear some mumblings and I did see some images. Most made me unhappy. But I still reserved judgment.

So judgment day arrived. It wasn't off to a good start: I didn't sleep well the night before, my back hurt, I had a headache and it was Independence Day (I have much better things to be doing than sitting in a theater for 2 1/2 hours...). But again, I kept an open mind and tried not to go into the situation with a crap attitude. I got a big tub of popcorn and ice-cold Cherry Coke. That cheered me up. The previews came and went. Then it was time...everything went dark. And then you heard it. The awesome, rumbling voice of Peter Cullen. Fantastic. Also, you hear the ever classic transformation sound (albeit the only time in the movie). Fantastic. Then you see Cybertron...not fantastic. But Peter Cullen is still talking, so that makes it tolerable. The nostalgia hadn't worn off yet.

I'm not going to sit here and type a play by play of the movie. But I will recommend seeing it. As a movie with giant transforming robots, it's amazing. From the eyes of a TF fan...I didn't like it.There were a million things I'd change and I won't list them all, but I will say two words: Welker and Frenzy. Two of the worst decisions of the movie. Another big gripe is this: because Michael Bay screwed with the look of the TFs and made them all look the same (aka 'crap'), it was very tough to tell what was going on in the battle scenes. The cinematography was all over the place and it moved very fast. So a lot of the time you're just trying to figure out what you're looking at as opposed to seeing giant Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot battles.

To end this post on an upswing, Shia LaBeouf was the perfect choice. Absolutely hilarious. His delivery was killer and his acting was right on for the movie. And don't get me started on Megan Fox. I'm just glad she could act too. In fact, the casting (with the exception of Welker) was great. There were a lot of unnecessary characters in the movie, but overall it was good. Again, I recommend going to see it. But go see it not as a Transformers movie, but as a big transforming robots movie. Big robots and big explosions should be seen on the big screen.

'Til all are one...

-Zach