Transformers (2007)

transformer HDDVD

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Transformers (Two-Disc Special Edition) [HD DVD]
Price: USD 19.95

77 used & new available from USD 5.99

Movie info:

File Type : KLCP.Matroska
File Size : 8136MB
Media Length : 02:23:27
Video Size : 1280 x 528
Video Format : MPEG4 Video (H264) 23.98fps
Audio : DTS 48000Hz 6ch

http://imdb.com/title/tt0418279/

Genre: Action/Adventure

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight, Bernie Mac
Director: Michael Bay
Screenwriter: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Producer: Tom De Santo, Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

HD Movie Reviews:

HD DVD REVIEW
By John J. Puccio
By Jason P. Vargo
FIRST PUBLISHED Oct 12, 2007

“Freedom is the right of all sentient beings” –Optimus Prime

Note: In the follow joint review, John Puccio and Jason Vargo both wrote up their comments on the movie, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Thoughts.

The Movie According to John:
A caution: If you are fourteen years of age or younger, or if you grew up as a fan of the Transformers action figures or animated TV series, you will want to ignore my review and skip immediately down to Jason’s slightly more positive comments. That’s because you will love this new, live-action, CGI “Transformers” movie. It’s explosive, colorful, fast-paced, and eye-catching, everything you could possibly want from the franchise. However, if you are an adult and not already a Transformers fan, you may find the movie more than a bit long, loud, and frenzied.

I remember back in the 1980s visiting a toy shop in Carmel, CA, and seeing several huge Transformer figures, about two or three-feet tall and extremely well detailed, and thinking how great they looked. But then I wondered what I would do with such a plaything if I ever bought one, and after looking at the price tags I abandoned the idea altogether. But comparisons with the current movie are apt. Both the superdeluxe toy and the new movie look great–colorful and complex–and they would both probably be fun to look at for a time; yet both of them are essentially empty and devoid of much entertainment value except as transitory showpieces. Still, a momentary diversion is all that “Transformers” strives for, and for the most part it succeeds.

When Machines Turn Bad:
The plot involves two sets of thinking robotic machines, one set good, the other set bad, both groups capable of morphing their shapes into any number of other mechanical objects. They come to Earth looking for something called an Allspark, a space cube capable of generating enough energy to destroy or recreate entire worlds. Caught in the middle of this technological tug-of-war is a teenager, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), who, inadvertently and reluctantly, takes sides with the good guys, Optimus Prime and the Autobots, against the baddies, Megatron and the Decepticons.

I have no objection to this cataclysmic story line. What I object to is that the movie is way, way too long, the final battle going on for at least forty-five hectic minutes. I found myself fidgeting by the second half of the film and almost nodding off during the climactic shoot-out.

When Directors Turn Bad:
Michael Bay directed “Transformers.” Some of his previous films include “Bad Boys” and “Bad Boys II,” “Armageddon,” “The Rock,” and “Pearl Harbor.” In his favor, I liked the excesses of “The Rock,” for me the only one of Bay’s films that succeeded. Otherwise, he tends to overindulge himself. Whatever works in a film he does again and again within the same film. For example, there is enough eye candy in “Transformers” to satisfy anybody’s fun factor for at least a lifetime, and the Transformers’ CGI transformations look splendid. At least, the first few times we see it done. Unfortunately, Bay seems to think that since it looked good once, he should repeat it unto the threshold of pain, so we get to see virtually the same transformations about 800 times. By the end of the movie, they become little more than a yawn.

As I said before, I think maybe you either have to be very young or have to have grown up with the Transformers franchise in the 80s to appreciate the film fully. The audience I saw it with in a theater were equally divided between younger children and men in their late twenties and thirties, and both groups seemed to be enjoying themselves. As an old fart, though, I found the movie gaudy, blaring, frenetic, and, as I say, long. At almost two-and-a-half hours, it overstays its welcome by a good thirty minutes.

Anyway, what should I have expected? It’s a movie based on a series of toys and cartoons. Darn right it’s going to be juvenile and cartoony. What I didn’t expect, though, was the movie’s huge similarity to “Independence Day.” There’s the same interweaving of multiple plot strands and several sets of characters, all of them coming together at the end, and there’s even the same government cover-up of alien technology involved.

Shia LaBeouf is good as Sam Witwicky, the ordinary, put-upon teenager caught up in extraordinary events. Kevin Dunn and Julie White are fittingly moronic as Sam’s parents. In teen comedies, you’ll remember, parents are either idiots or completely absent from the picture. Megan Fox as Sam’s friend Mikaela is appropriately foxy. Josh Duhamel as Captain Lennox is acceptably heroic in a second plot strand. Rachel Taylor and Anthony Anderson almost disappear from the movie after making brief appearances in what might have been the beginnings of yet another subplot that was discarded partway through the script. John Voight keeps a straight face as the Secretary of Defense, John Keller (anyway, a straighter face than Donald Rumsfeld would have managed). Bernie Mac has a cute bit part early on as a used-car salesman. And thank goodness for John Turturro as an uptight government agent, because he seems like the only actor in the picture who realized the whole affair probably started out as a campy, tongue-in-cheek thriller instead of the dead-serious movie or outright comedy that most of the cast play it for.

Despite my reservations, I have to admit that “Transformers” turned out better than I expected, but it’s still no award winner. Sure, it’s lightweight fun for the kid in all of us, but I would emphasize the word “lightweight.” 6/10

The Movie According to Jason:
In a summer of $200,000,000 comedies (”Evan Almighty”) and $300,000,000 action spectacles (”Spider-Man 3″), one film flew under the radar, relatively speaking. “Transformers,” the second big-screen adaptation of the Hasbro toy line about two sets of vehicle morphing robots, delivers in all the places that spiders, pirates, and surfers couldn’t: It’s a crowd pleasing, rock ´em, sock ´em, explosion laden 144-minutes with no pretense of being anything more than it is.

In all honesty, the “Star Trek,” Borg cube-inspired Allspark is the MacGuffin in this story, conveniently dropped into the plot as an excuse to watch cars turned into robots, those robots fire rockets and missiles and energy weapons at each other while puny humans carry on like it’s the end of the world. Knowing this, how deep a story can an audience reasonably expect? Not very. But we don’t go to any film based on a 1980s cartoon, let alone a Bay film, to be wowed by superior acting or a revolutionary script. We go to see stuff blown up really good. And, on that count, “Transformers” delivers the goods better than any pure action movie of the last five years.

Every aspect of the film is a wonder to behold, not just the buildings when weapon blasts eat out chunks of their sides or the massive robots wrestling with each other in Ultimate Fighting Championship-type encounters. Either Industrial Light and Magic has progressed leaps and bounds beyond the effects houses that handled “Spider-Man 3″ and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” or those other outfits are grossly incompetent. From a rational standpoint, there is no way that what is on screen could come from miniatures or stop motion. But from a moviemaking standpoint, how can Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York look so obviously fake and cartoonish, yet the Autobots and Decepticons so convincingly real?

They blend in with their surroundings so completely and interact so flawlessly with the human actors that it’s not outside the realm of possibility the production team assembled full-size robots for every sequence in the picture. There are no jerky movements, not so much as a detail out of place. Scorch marks, dents, dings…even the way each individual gear moves when one of the Transformers walks. The effects are bar none the best we’ve seen this year, outside of “300.”

Even the actors fulfill their end of the bargain. Of course, they’re not asked to do a whole lot besides run, jump, slide, yell, and pull triggers. With Josh Duhamel (TV´s “Las Vegas”), Tyrese Gibson, Anthony Anderson, Jon Voight, John Turturro, and Bernie Mac, a cast which reminds us more of “Armageddon” than “The Rock,” takes shape. Without fail, everyone in the film does what they were contracted to do: Duhamel provides the good-looking poster boy; Mac provides a welcome breath of humor early on; Voight is his patented bewildered government official (here the Secretary of Defense); and Turturro is the man we all love to hate.

But the majority of the acting duties fall to LaBeouf, who scored a role in “Indiana Jones IV” based on his work here. The reason is pretty obvious. He can go from a regular teenager worried about getting a car and a girl to near action hero in three seconds flat, pulling off both roles with equal authority. And he makes us believe every quick-thinking quip really comes to him in the spur of the moment, as opposed to being the brainchild of scriptwriters. LaBeouf can headline a summer action movie like this one, and he can anchor a good drama like “Disturbia.” With the right mix of films in his future, he should have a long career in Hollywood.

Then there’s the plot. The Allspark has been kept in a US landmark for decades, and its power signature has been masked from everyone by reinforced concrete. I’m sorry, but concrete? Are you serious? This thing has the power to destroy entire worlds and concrete keeps all manner of scans from seeing its location? And the final decision to move the cube is just as bewildering. Why, outside of the “blowing stuff up good” rationale, would anybody agree to this plan?

Hell, we can bat around all manner of plot holes or head scratchers, but that wouldn’t be fun. For the sake of argument, though: Why are people continuing to run from the scene of the final battle twenty minutes after its started? Is the government so desperate as to be recruiting analysts out of high school? And why, for the love of everything rational, does the military consistently discount the one person with any credible information on the Transformers or the Allspark? Not that it really matters: This is an action movie with no agenda.

If there is one aspect of the film that doesn’t quite live up to what it should be, it’s the introduction of Optimus Prime and the final battle with Megatron. When Optimus finally comes on the scene, there should be a bombastic score, something to herald the coming of the hero the fans want to see. There isn’t that sense that everything will be okay once he’s arrived. Think of how Darth Vader is introduced in “Return of the Jedi,” with the Imperial March. Prime is a hero worthy of that level of reverence.

And that final battle is the one flat action sequence in the film. The other scenes are kinetic, with dizzying camera shots and a clear idea of who’s doing what to whom, a directing style many action directors can learn from. Yet there’s no sense of drama or excitement about the final battle; this is the titanic match up between Luke and Vader or Picard and the Borg Queen, but it comes off as feeling run of the mill.

“Transformers” isn’t supposed to be anything except loud action pulp to fill a summer slot and rake in the money. Oh, yeah, and sell toys. For only the second time this year, I walked out of the theater with one singular thought in my head: I can not wait to see this movie on high-def DVD.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a major disappointment: the classic “Transformers” theme song is nowhere to be found in the film. It had been remixed for the 1986 animated movie, but it’s absent here. The whole thing didn’t need to be included; part of it over the end credits would have been welcome.

“Transformers” is a family-friendly film, with no real objectionable content. However, there is a large amount of fighting and peril, which might cause a smaller child to have problems. The movie rates a strong 7/10 because it delivers on its premise and doesn’t get bogged down in plot trivialities. And summer action never looked so good.

Video:
The film showed up pretty well in a theater, and in HD DVD Paramount reproduce it much as I remember it from my local movie house, with one exception noted below. Using an MGEG-4AVC codec, the video engineers maintain the film’s original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. What we see is a relatively clean screen, free of grain and transfer noise, even in darker outdoor shots, freer of grain, in fact, than I remember from the movie in a theater, leading me to think that perhaps Paramount applied some form of grain filtering to the transfer. Colors are bright, rich, and deep, perhaps a tad too bright, rich, and deep for real life, and a touch glassy, too, but appropriate for a cartoonish movie like “Transformers.” Definition is, as we might expect, near flawless, the crispness of the delineation serving to point up every detail in the mechanical creatures. Any blur in the actual transformations I assume was intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

Audio:
The big controversy in the audio department swirls around Paramount’s decision not to include a Dolby TrueHD track on what is possibly their highest-profile HD DVD release of the year. Most viewers probably won’t even notice the missing lossless track, but its omission will surely annoy audiophiles and videophiles. I have no idea what was behind Paramount’s decision. Perhaps, and most likely, they didn’t have room on the disc for the track; perhaps they figured there wasn’t a big enough audience for it; perhaps they think there is no discernable difference in sound quality between TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus; or perhaps they just made a mistake and forgot it. I don’t know. I do know that in every past instance where I’ve had a chance instantly to compare the two audio formats, I have always found differences in the sound quality; not always big differences, but always differences. And I have always favored the slightly smoother, less bright, and less forward sound of TrueHD over DD+. But I may be among the few who hear such differences or care about them. In any case, it seems to me to have been an unwise decision for Paramount to leave off a TrueHD track if for no other reason than public relations. It’s good PR to have the track and bad PR to omit it, particularly on a blockbuster where many people perceive the sound as critical to the overall movie experience.

Be that as it may, what we do have, Dolby Digital Plus 5.1, is plenty good enough, and since there is nothing with which to compare it, we will never know if TrueHD could have sounded any better. The DD+ produces room-rumbling bass, with a strong, well-focused impact; midrange of remarkable clarity; and treble that glistens. The front-channel stereo spread is wide, and the filmmakers take all the advantage they can of the surrounds. Rousing, pinpoint directional sounds from all five main speakers do a lot a to sell the show. I can’t imagine anyone complaining about the audio on this one.

Extras:
The sheer quantity of extras will thrill fans of the film, I’m sure, especially as most of them are in high definition. Non-fans, however, may simply see them as more of the same. Disc one includes the feature film; twenty-three scene selections; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. In addition, there is a commentary by director Michael Bay in which the filmmaker seems to me a somewhat immodest fellow, his comments often self-serving. Then there is “Paramount HD Connect” for further on-line features. And, of greatest use, “Transformers H.U.D.,” a “Heads Up Display” that is essentially like WB’s picture-in-picture “In-Movie Experience” and features various pop-up bits of trivia about the film as well as shots of the filmmakers discussing various scenes as the scenes are playing out.

Disc two includes a number of other bonus items, divided into several categories: “Our World,” “Their War,” “More Than Meets the Eye,” trailers, and the like, mostly, as I say, in HD. In “Our World” we find “The Story Sparks” (HD), “Human Allies” (HD), “I Fight Giant Robots” (HD), and
“Battleground” (HD), segments that one can play separately or all at once. Together, they total about forty-nine minutes and provide information on the origins of the movie, the actors, the military background, and the special effects in the battle scenes.

In “Their War” we find “Rise of the Robots” (HD), “Autobots Roll Out” (HD), “Decepticons Strike” (HD), and “Inside the AllSpark” (HD), about sixty-five minutes total, covering the background of the toys and cartoons and the special effects of the cars and such. In this section we also find “Transformers Tech Inspector,” where we can look at each of the autobots up close in an interactive mode.

Then, in “More Than Meets the Eye” we find a nine-minute segment called “From Script to Sand: The Skorponok Desert Attack” (HD) and, better, a series of beautiful concept art (HD). Also on disc two, we find trailers–two theatrical trailers and a teaser trailer, all in HD. Lastly, I understand there is a series of Easter eggs in the set: a Michael Bay cameo appearance, “Bay Bot,” “Girl in Dress,” and “Casting Mojo.”

The two-disc HD case comes housed in an attractive slipcover. But here’s the thing: The thin, translucent-plastic slipcover contains all the disc details printed on it. The HD case itself has a cover with nothing written on it front or back, only the title on the spine. Therefore, if you want to know what’s in the case, you have to use the slipcover, something I don’t generally do and resent being forced to do. I usually leave slipcovers in a drawer upstairs because I see no need for them in my collection. Except in this event.

Parting Thoughts:
It’s huge; it’s loud; and it’s filled with things that crash and blow up in glorious high-definition picture and sound. “Transformers” is everything you expect from a colossal summertime blockbuster. Looking for logic, sense, reason, even sanity in a story based on a children’s toy would stretching a point. The movie is for the eye and the ear, not the brain. It turned out a lot better than I thought by looking and sounding so good in HD, so give it some credit. Big, dumb, and attractive in this case is probably good enough.

As Mikaela says, “This car’s a pretty good driver.”

Transformers (Two-Disc Special Edition) [HD DVD]
Price: USD 19.95

77 used & new available from USD 5.99

HD Movie Screenshot: