Have you guys seen this?!

[schmosef]

Untitled Transformers Film

(please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck)

[TnT]

From Greg's Previews:

After two years of reports of director "short lists" that usually included Michael Bay and Robert Zemeckis in addition to a few others, The Hollywood Reporter announces today that it is Bay who is officially in talks, with the necessary production start date getting closer and closer. I am disappointed, frankly, and this movie just dropped, nay, *plummetted*, on my own personal anticipation scale. Have most of Bay's movies done fairly well at the box office? Absolutely. Have any of them been accepted as being very "good" by either critics or fans? By my estimation, nope, not by a long shot. Maybe this summer's The Island will be awesome, entertaining, etc. and Bay's first actually good movie. I haven't seen it. I just know I have disliked every single movie he has ever made. Bay's films are loud, oddly lit, too quickly cut (with shaky camera movement at that), and pretty much represent everything I think is wrong with big-budget Hollywood films.

"The Transformers", on the other hand, honestly, legitimately has (had?) a chance of being a really special movie. Just a few days ago, Sin City opened in theaters, and showed us a sort of comics-style action entertainment that totally broke down the barriers of what you expect to see on the screen. That movie *respected* its source material so much you could see the love in every shot. On the other hand, many of the people in Hollywood who are given the reins to comic book (or in this case, toys popularized by comic books) projects whose execution of the adaptation show a clear lack of respect for the source. Now, up until now, the producers have been talking all about "respect", and how they "get" what the fans love about TF. The announcement of Michael Bay makes me serious ask, are you sure? Because hiring Bay makes you look like you really don't get it. Bay's got a lousy track record, and I feel comfortable calling him out on that. I honestly don't think he will deliver a decent "Transformers" movie.

I think this will probably end up being a very "Fast and the Furious"-ish movie, focusing on the human characters (well, that's already been confirmed), so the Transformers will mostly appear as "talking cars and planes" and will probably only appear in robot form briefly. What we *should* get is the opposite, with human characters barely seen, and about 50% of the movie spent in robot form. The truly excellent 1986 animated movie (and the popular TV series) used that formula, and it worked wonderfully, allowing you to get to know many characters without needing to view them through human eyes, as this movie will be doing. Why do the producers feel the need to change the formula? 'Sin City' showed that the fantastic can now be brought to the screen with all of its fantasy intact. You don't have to water down the formula. The formula worked in 1986; it can work in 2005 and 2006. And it worked without Michael Bay.

[schmosef]

There's a song in the Team America World Police movie, written by Trey Parker, where Michael Bay is panned for how bad Pearl Harbor turned out.

I hope Bay took that to heart. He's going to have a lot of pissed off fans on his hands if he does a lousy job on this movie.

[Kurt]

Apparently he's done lousy jobs before. Doesn't seem to stop him from making more lousy jobs...

[KvHagedorn]

A live-action version

How can this possibly not suck?

[Fluff]

I think he should do a trial version with Beast Wars, then if any good, he should be allowed on Transformers.

It would be great if they did it with Futurama Style graphics.

[TnT]

How can this possibly not suck?

If the did a good job at doing 3d Transformers ala the stuff here: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/msmith1015/VWVideo.htm
I think it'd be possible to make a pretty cool movie.