Fill in the blank: ___________ In Disguise.

[elfs]

Oh Omaha! You'll want to see this: Michael Bay. Steven Spielberg. Peter Cullen.

Michael Bay? Michael "The Island" "Pearl Harbor" "Armageddon" "The Rock" Bay? Unless Spielberg has Bay on a leash with a shock collar this is going to suck hard. It's be beautiful, noisy, exciting, and meaningless.

Get out your "Cycle of the Hero" cards and be prepared to take notes: Bay never does anything except by the numbers. Armageddon is a crappy movie with lousy physics. The only reason to watch it is the utterly gorgeous launch sequence with some of the best music ever produced for a launch sequence (is that a category recognized by the Grammys?). But if you take a sheet of paper and write down the name of every characters along one side, and the "cycle of the hero" as enumerated by Joseph Campbell along the top, you can tick off each step as precisely as a metronome as the movie proceedes. Everyone gets their own mini-cycle. Even the heroine, who does nothing more than sit out the flick in a cushy chair. I bet this flick will do the same.

Comments

[littleone66.livejournal.com]

What did you expect... it's a movie about a kids show and toy....

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Twenty years ago it was a kid's show and toy advertisement. Today, it's a part of our historical zeitgeist. And Spielberg's been avoiding kitsch for the past few years, so it's gonna be a serious film. This is going to be a "grown up" Transformers the way we've recently gotten a "grown up" Bond. And Bay doesn't know how to do anything else.

[andrewducker]

Explosions!
Giant Robots!
Slow motion Explosions!
Slow motion Giant Robots!

What's not to love?

Saw Armageddeon at the cinema twice, and loved it. Seen The Rock a few times too - and loved Con Air. Pearl Harbour was awful, but that's because Bay can't do people.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Um...
Uh...
Okay....

Yeah, I'll go ahead and squee on this one simply because I ::love:: the Transformers, but, like, it just isn't that serious, you know.

BUT THEY KEPT PETER CULLEN'S VOICE!!!! YES!!!! AND IT LOOKS LIKE THEY'VE GOT FRANK WELKER TO DO MEGATRON!! YES!!!

I mean, it just IS NOT Transformers without those guys.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Being as geeky as I am, I slowed the thing down to 1/6th speed. With the exception of Optimus, all of the autobots are Chevy's. I wouldn't be surprised is Optimus was a Frieghtliner, which is a division of GM, much like Chevrolet.

The Rock

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

I have to step in to defend "The Rock". So what if it's by the numbers...it's a James Bond movie with the serial numbers filed off. Bond stories and movies hold closer to Campbell's Hero cycle than most myths and they wouldn't be the same if they didn't. Besides how can you not like the premise: What would happen if James Bond managed to get old.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

What you said.

One of the folk over at the City of Heroes message boards (surprisingly worthwhile place sometimes) pointed out that one of the virtues of the original Transformers was that the real characters were the Transformers themselves. The writers (somehow) resisted the urge to make up some lousy bunch of kids as the real main characters and instead put strong personalities into the robots themselves and put them front and center.

Michael Bay, however, is quoted as saying that he thinks the movie should be something like 70% character interaction and 30% stuff blowing up.

....

It's doomed.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

You are so frackin' right, dude. The Transformers are the robots, not any humans stuck in. The human interactions were really just a platform off of which the robots themselves dealt with their own interactions.

This movie will suck because of that, more than anything else...you can even see it in the trailer. Thanks, Bay and Spielberg, for ruining my teenage/college-hood. :(

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

William and I decided that we're waiting for Paul Verhoeven's Thundercats.

And then we agreed that Elf probably ends up with a writing credit on that one.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I wonder how Verhoeven's going to make a fascist society out of Thundera. I gave up on Paul Verhoeven after listening to him talk about how he had wanted to make the movie version of Starship Troopers because he was so stoked about the fundamentally fascist nature of the society in the book... and had my fears borne out by what he produced. Admittedly, if he'd just taken "Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers" off the film, it would have been a fair B action movie. What he produced, though, is what I call the 'Nutrimatic tea' version of Heinlein's novel -- almost, but not quite, completely unlike the original. I do have to concede, though, that a childhood spent under Nazi occupation probably colors his attitude toward things.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

The society of the book Starship Troopers bloody well was fascist, and recognized as such by critics long before Verhoeven took on the movie project. It's hardly something he pulled out of thin air. He can hardly take the name 'Starship Troopers' off the movie when the movie is so intimately tied to the book.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Ahh, yes... critics. People who hold up their preconceptions, stretch a book to fit them, and then decry it for how badly distorted it is afterward. You can find people who read fascism into it, and you can find people like Poul Anderson, a self-described Libertarian, who commented:

"I never joined in the idiot cries of "fascist!" It was plain that the society of Starship Troopers is, on balance, more free than ours today. I did wonder how stable its order of things would be, and expressed my doubts in public print as well as in the occasional letters we exchanged. Heinlein took no offense. After a little argument back and forth, we both fell into reminiscences of Switzerland, where he got the notion in the first place." ("RAH: A Memoir.", 1992, printed in Requiem and Tributes to the Grand Master

It's interesting that Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier, the screenwriter, go to great pains in the audio commentary on the DVD release in an attempt to combat the perception that the movie glorified fascism. According to them, the film was intended to be an anti-fascist statement; they feel they depicted the future-Earth as a fairly mindless, knee-jerk "kill anything different" kind of place. Verhoeven especially makes his points with great fervor; he shouts, "That's bad! Bad!" and sounds like a man on the verge of a massive coronary throughout much of the track. Compare that with Verhoeven's statement in Starship Troopers: The Official Movie Magazine where he states "The philosophy of Heinlein is certainly in the movie. Whether I adhere to that society myself is something else, but it is the philosophy of the world he described, and we took that from his book." -- those two declarations can't be reconciled. If his statements during the DVD audio commentary are accurate, then he has caricatured the society in the book to drive his anti-fascist agenda, but those same distortions of the society -- along with all of the other butchery done to the plot and characterization -- destroy any resemblance of the result to the "philosophy of the world he (Heinlein) described".

In the DVD commentary, Verhoeven claims that he read through the first few chapters of the book and became both bored and depressed, and never actually finished reading the book. This may explain to some degree why the movie bears so little resemblance to the book. Another component of this may be that the movie, then titled "Bug Hunt on Planet Nine", was already well into pre-production before someone pointed out that the plot was ripping off Heinlein's novel, which they discovered hadn't yet been optioned, and proceeded to option the book and give the original script a glossover with fragments of the book. I find it interesting that Verhoeven muses in his commentary that he may have done too good a job with his satire; that alone is enough to shoot dead all of his claims to have preserved the "philosophy of the world", and explains a lot about why the movie sucked so badly; fans expected to see a movie adaptation of Starship Troopers, not a cardboard-cutout "fascism is bad, bad, bad" Riefenstahlesque parody piece waving Heinlein's name.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Hey, check it! Brad DeLong contributes to the discussion (though hardly in responce to our poor offerings). And... what DeLong said. Starship Troopers has multiple layers in which it is more or less 'fascist' in the technical sense of the term. This isn't something Verhoevan just made up, and his movie of the book is a legitimate critical response.

This type of argument *starts* by obeying Godwin's Law, and threatens to go downhill from there.

[(Anonymous)]

Whether Heinlein's book _Starship Troopers_ depicted a fascist society, or whether the system of government depicted by the book would have inevitably declined into fascism, is a question upon which many have heatedly argued and, I think, relatively few have shed much factual light.

And no wonder.

This is an argument that *starts* by obeying Godwin's Law.

I think if people must argue over it, the most fruitful approach might be to avoid using words like 'fascism'. Instead, try to objectively discuss what the book actually says, preferably in the book's own words, and then try to figure out, using relatively uncontroversial & easy-to-follow steps, what the logical consequences of these statements would be. Conclusions might include judging whether the book massively contradicts itself, or if the book misleads or errs about the logical consequences of what is depicted.

But if heated argument is demanded by some, I think people who insist on immediately using a classification system wherein they are treating 'fascist' Nazi Germany as more like 'fascist' Spain, rather than at least as much like the 'non-fascist' Stalinist USSR are, in a specialized area of thought, ignorant. Which is not to claim that any of the three represent desirable styles of government.

Chris N.

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Hey, I enjoyed The Rock!

In this case though, you're totally right. Transformers: The Movie will be:

Loud
Explosive
Dumb

The big question is, will it be fun?