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Probably one of the most anticipated "guilty pleasure" movie of the year for me has finally arrived and it delivered excitement in giving a new spin to something I enjoyed as a kid nearly twenty-three years ago. No, this movie won't be winning the best movie of the year award at the Oscars, if it gets a nod for anything beyond technical aspects for its computer graphic wizardry. What movie are we talking about? The movie is none other than Transformers, based on the toys from Hasbro that featured a line of robots who transformed into vehicles, and had a cartoon series to drive the sales of the toys.

Going back to 1984 when Transformers first hit the scene, I and all of my friends at the time went nuts for Transformers. We had to have all the toys and we watched the cartoons religiously. One of my prized possessions at the time was my Optimus Prime toy, and even though I would own a number of Transformers toys in the couple of years that Transformers just took over popularity in the early 80's, Optimus Prime was always my favorite. Maybe it was because he was the leader of the "Autobots" the good guy robots, or because in the end it was always his leadership and team that saved the day. I always admired the sense of teamwork and respect that always seemed to be present in their interactions and their noble mission of peace and saving humanity from the "Decepticons." I never really got into many of the Decepticons as they were the bad guys and always being underhanded. There was also a lot of deception within the chain of command with no sense of loyalty with many of the robots looking for opportunities to overthrow the chain of command at their first opportunity. Not a bad lesson to be learned from a cartoon even though I'm sure at the time most of it was over my head and only seems to become obviously apparent when looking back with nostalgia.

Well my interest in Transformers in the 1980's fizzled out due to two major factors, the first being my move to the United States from Canada and having to find a new set of friends who didn't really have the same interests as I did, nor the same cultural references I had. And the second factor that killed my interested in Transformers was animated Transformers movie that was released at the time. In that movie, Optimus Prime was killed off. Sure it was for dramatic effect and it was an ultimate sacrifice, but the main character I liked was gone, and Transformers just wasn't the same to me ever again. I know the character was resurrected and what not in the lore of the Transformers but it was never the same to me, so my interests moved onto other things.

Anyway, fast forward to 2007 and the event movie of the year is the transformation of the Transformers into a live action movie, granted, heavily animated with computer graphics, but definitely not like the original animated cartoon. The robots in the car formations are current and modern, and their robot shapes seem believable to have come from the car formations, but kind of lack some of the personality the old cartoons had, but they didn't have to deal with the kind of restraints that apply to live action movies. What truly makes it work for me, and I hope for lots of long time Transformers fans, is that the actor who voiced Optimus Prime in the original cartoons, Peter Cullen, was tapped to be the voice of Optimus Prime in the film. According to some of my research into the Transformers movie, ardent fans of Transformers made a big effort to ensure that Michael Bay's movie version had Peter Cullen to voice Optimus Prime otherwise they would boycott the movie. In a podcast interview with Peter Cullen, he was quite touched that the fans were so vocal in their support in wanting his voice to be featured in the movie. Without Cullen's voice, there really truly would be little beyond the logos for the Autobots and the Decepticons to tie this movie with the original Transformers to feed the nostalgia for folks like me.

While the actors in the film, most likely know, no matter what, they are playing second fiddle to CGI robots and cars, the cast does help make the movie fun. I'm not normally a John Voight fan, but I really enjoyed his performance as the US Secretary of Defense. Josh Duhamel who is familiar to those who are fans of the television series, "Las Vegas" gives a decent performance giving the emotion to being chased by machines out to kill him and the members of his platoon. Probably the weakest link in the human actors is Shia LaBeouf, who plays the lead kid that both the Autobots and Decepticons are after. He's kind of annoying but he's believable and if it wasn't for his devotion to his car, Bumblebee, he'd be a total write off as a character.

My only real complaints about the movie are that there isn't enough distinctiveness between the robots in their looks as robots that when they are in combat with each other it just looks like a lot of metal beating the shit out of each other that you really can't tell which one is which. Outside of the distinctive voice of Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, you don't hear enough of the others to get a flair for their character to use that as a way to differentiate them. Another complaint is that the robot that disguises itself as a CD Boombox is really quite annoying, in much the same way that Jar Jar Binks ruins Star Wars Episode 1. And my last major complaint is one that people who know Western United States geography would notice. One of pivotal scenes occurs at Hoover Dam which is about 30 miles from Las Vegas. At one point, there is a sense of urgency to get to "the city" for the climatic battle. So where is the climactic battle? It's in downtown Los Angeles, about 300 miles away. If it was that urgent to get to a city for the plot point, wouldn't it have made sense to get to the nearest one which is about a half hour's drive away rather than one that even optimistically is a 4 hour drive away? I suppose in the scale of disaster movies, Los Angeles is a city more people like to see destroyed than Las Vegas, but personally I would have much preferred to have seen the climactic battle over the Las Vegas strip.

Despite these minor issues that I'm probably one of the few who would even notice or care about, the movie is a lot of fun. And while the robots really don't resemble their cartoon counterparts that closely, it makes for a fun movie and for me a fun trip into some nostalgia, so much so, that I even had to order an Optimus Prime toy off of eBay, not one based on the movie figure, but one of the originals since I no longer have my original Optimus Prime toy. And the one I bought on eBay doesn't quite match the original one I had, this new one is one released a few years ago in Japan as a Pepsi promotional product, where the tractor trailer that originally came with Optimus Prime was replaced with a flatbed trailer where a bottle shaped can of Pepsi can be towed. And instead of an Autobot logo on one of his shoulders, it has the Pepsi logo. So even though it's like Optimus Prime sold out to be Pepsi's pimp, it's not unlike us all who pimp ourselves out for our jobs and lord knows the dialogue in the Transformers movie has Optimus Prime pimping the hell out of eBay!! It's a sign of the times.

Ryan