3:10 to Yuma

Some people have been exclaiming that 3:10 to Yuma will be the film to revive the largely dormant Western genre. While I suspect it will take more than one movie to accomplish such a feat (where, for example, are all the pirate movies after the success of Pirates of the Caribbean?), 3:10 is certainly a monumental step in the right direction. Filled with searing action, crisp dialogue, and a number of pitch-perfect performances, this is the sort of film that transcends the Western genre and appeals to all fans of movies.

A remake of the 1957 original, 3:10 follows two seemingly different men who may have more in common than either would suspect. Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is one of the most notorious outlaws in the west. Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is a weary rancher trying to support his family while facing a foreclosure on his land. The two meet by chance one day when Evans and his two boys stumble upon Wade and his men robbing a stagecoach. From that point on, it seems the two's lives are destined to be intertwined. Wade comes across Evans again in town later that day and ends up helping the lawmen capture Wade. Realizing he can make the money needed to save his land, he offers to help escort Wade to the town of Contention, where a train will be arriving in a few days time that will take Wade to be tried and hung in Yuma. It becomes a task easier said than done, as Wade's men are on their tail.

That the film is filled with crackling action is no surprise. There are many extended gun fights, great chase scenes, and an explosive climax. Like some of the greatest of Westerns, violence is a way of life in these men's lives. The way in which director James Mangold depicts the violence, however, is often quite shocking and unpredictable. I was at times reminded of Scorsese's The Departed in the way that you're never sure who will die or what will happen next. For example, the way in which a major character is so matter-of-factly killed off half way through the film without a second thought serves to remind us that this film doesn't play by the typical rules of most Hollywood films. No film I've seen this year kept me on the edge of my seat guessing what could happen next quite like 3:10 did.

What wasn't so expected about 3:10, and what serves to elevate it from a great action film to a great film, is the brilliant script and the performances that bring that script to life. The characters, especially Wade and Evans, have some very intelligent discussions about life and honor, right and wrong. Some people have criticized the end of the film as being a little too out of character for one of the leads, but I believe that if you listen to what the characters say throughout the film, it will make sense how the end plays out. It also helps that Crowe and Bale deliver some career high performances. Bale is his usual overly serious self, but with a hint of something more, perhaps desperation. This isn't just a man beat by life, but a man who knows he's been beaten by life and has realized that only some sort of miracle can save him. Crowe, on the other hand, seems to be having the time of his life. I've never been a big fan of Crowe for some reason, but here he is nothing short of genius. He is alternatively funny, scary, thoughtful, amused, and wounded. He's so interesting that we begin to wonder if we actually want Evans to get Wade to that train in the end. Supporting them are Peter Fonda as a grizzled old lawman who may be an even less decent human being than Wade, and Ben Foster as Wade's right hand man. Fonda is wonderful and mysterious, but it is relative newcomer Foster that really shines in the supporting cast. He is so frightening and menacing without ever going over-the-top that you begin to wonder why he isn't in charge of the band of criminals instead of Wade.

The Western has long been feared dead, but 3:10 reminds us why the genre was such an important part of film history. It has that rare ability to entertain us while delivering something more, something with weight. The final act is both smart in its dialogue about heroism and exciting in depicting two men who may both be heroes given the right situation. Director James Mangold is a man who had yet to impress me up to this point. His Identity was a fun thriller with an ending that betrayed all the film's built up suspense. Walk the Line was an example of why biopics are so dangerous, as he seemed to be on autopilot. Here he finally gets it right, and as a result he delivers one of the most exciting, thought-provoking, and downright fun pictures of the year.

Halloween

If you were to ask an average movie-goer to describe the movie Psycho, I suspect they'd have a pretty easy time of it until they get to the end. "So then, Norman jumps out dressed as his mother, only to be subdued before he can kill the girl. And then... um... he's arrested? I think..." Let's face it: Psycho is a brilliant film until the final scene - a scene so backwards and banal that most people don't even think about it. For those who don't remember, a refresher: we get a lengthy psychological explanation from a doctor as to why Bates dressed up as his mother and killed people. It's about as uninspired an ending as you can imagine to such a thrilling film. But what, you ask, could this possibly have to do with Halloween, Rob Zombie's re-imagining of the 1978 horror classic? Picture someone trying to remake Psycho (again) and centering the focus of the film not on Norman and his victims, but on that final scene stretched out for half of the run time. That, essentially, is Rob Zombie's Halloween.

Remakes are pretty much always a mistake. You generally have two options: you can either just retell the same exact story and update the setting and style to today's standards, or you can focus on a certain part of the original and go in that new direction. If you go the first route, you are basically saying there's no real reason to see the new version unless the first was deeply flawed. If you go the second route, you risk alienating fans of the original by going places no one cares about. Zombie chose the second option, and it is completely the wrong direction to take this story. What made Michael Myers so chilling in the original was that we didn't know anything about him. Why was he killing people? Why was he after Laurie Strode (an answer not given until the sequels)? By giving us explicit answers (and answers none too exciting or daring) it takes away from the suspense.

What's perhaps most jarring is that, for a film billed as a horror movie, there is a huge dearth of actual horror. The first half hour is spent with young Michael Myers and his deadbeat family. We see him verbally abused by his step-dad, tormented by bullies, and ignored by his older sister. But none of this is meant to scare us. Even when Myers snaps and kills his family, it's not presented in nearly as frightening way as the opening POV shot of the original. Instead, he just wanders around with either a knife or a bat, attacking whomever he comes across. There's no buildup, no suspense, no jump moments. It's all very matter-of-fact in the way it's presented. And once he does murder his family, we get a long period of him in the asylum with Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), talking about his fascination with masks. One would assume that Zombie is spending all this time boring us with details about Michael so as to make him a more interesting character in the second half of the film, but alas, once Michael escapes and heads back to Haddonfield in search of his baby sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), everything that has been established about the character is thrown out in favor of simple slasher material.

Really, where the first half bores us with its silly examination of what makes Michael tick, the second half is even worse. Imagine taking the original Halloween and cutting it in half and you'd get the second part of Zombie's version. But even that is to give this too much credit. In order to get the film to its conclusion in under two hours, Zombie cuts out all sense of tension or atmosphere. One perfect example that sums up why this half of the film doesn't work is to look at the way Zombie kills of Annie (Danielle Harris) vs how Carpenter did in the original. Carpenter spent a good five or ten minutes building suspense without showing us Myers. We'd get spooky POV shots of someone watching Annie change her shirt. We'd watch with bated breath as Annie investigates a sound out in the laundry room in the garage. It wasn't until we began to assume that maybe she was safe that Carpenter let Myers pounce. Zombie, on the other hand, has Annie fooling around with her boyfriend while Myers just stands behind them. No build up, no tension. There he is at the beginning of the scene. One gets the impression that Zombie believes that copious amounts of blood and nudity will make up for that lack of atmosphere, but it never does.

Perhaps the reason it's all so boring isn't just the lack of artistry in how Zombie creates tension, but in the way he creates his characters. The cast is almost unanimously awful and unsympathetic. One would think that Malcolm McDowell would be a fascinating choice as Loomis, but he plays Loomis as far too jovial and lacking in gravitas. We begin to wonder if he actually realizes how dangerous Michael Myers is. At times he treats Myers as more of a buddy who had a few too many drinks and went on a drunken rage than as a man who has murdered close to twenty people. Tyler Mane as the adult Myers is satisfactory, but then anyone with a good build could do this role in their sleep. I don't like to rag on child actors, but there's no getting around the fact that Daeg Faerch is miscast as the young Michael Myers. Aside from the fact that he simply doesn't look like a future mass murderer with his blond hair and baby fat face, he can't bring any menace to his lines. Nor is he sympathetic, something we assume Zombie wanted him to be. Scout Taylor-Compton is a non-entity, not showing up until late in the movie and not getting an opportunity to do much more than call her friends bitches and scream a lot. It's clear we aren't supposed to see her as the same Laurie of the original, but she isn't able to create a new, interesting version of the character either. The rest of the cast is largely cameos, and none do much with their parts. And only Rob Zombie would think to cast Danny Trejo as the kindly janitor at the mental institution.

In every possible way that this movie can fail, it does. Zombie's desire to humanize Michael Myers comes off as silly and dull. His attempts at horror are rendered fruitless because he can't seem to build any suspense whatsoever. His intention to reinvent the characters we already know prove fruitless because of the way the film is split into two halves, forcing him to rush through each half without focusing on the characters. I consider myself somewhat of a horror film aficionado, and I can enjoy even some of the bad horror films out there as long as they deliver on the basic promise every horror film makes: a few good jumps, some suspense, and even a laugh or two. Rob Zombie's Halloween does not deliver on any of these promises, and even the most forgiving, open minded horror fan will find nothing to enjoy. It's simply a disaster.

Superbad

Who'd have guessed? In a summer of threequels, giant robots, rat chefs, amnesiac spies, and The Simpsons family, it is the duo of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen that will walk away the real champs. Knocked Up started the summer off with a bang, and now Superbad - which Apatow produced and Rogen wrote - ends the summer on an even higher note.

Superbad sounds like many a teen comedy: a single day in the life of high school seniors looking to lose their virginity before graduation. Indeed, many of the plot points are straight out of other films: the two leads, Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera), need to buy the booze for the party in order to impress their respective crushes. They enlist their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has a fake ID, to get the alcohol. From there their night is filled with many misadventures. In short, this could easily be a pretty generic movie. Yet somehow it is able to overcome the plot to be probably the best, most sincere, and funniest teen comedy since American Pie.

What makes it all work is a script that understands high schoolers. That could be a result of the fact that Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg first wrote the screenplay when they were in high school. These characters aren't high school stereotypes, but recognizable people. I don't know about you, but my high school didn't have nearly as defined cliques as John Hughes might lead you to believe. Yes there were nerds, yes there were preps, yes there were jocks, but there were also a lot of people who just were. They weren't popular, but they weren't losers either. That gray area is where Seth and Evan exist. They get picked on by people of higher status, but then in turn are held up in comparison to other characters. Not taking the characters to an extreme is what makes it so relatable, and so funny.

It also helps that it's really about something, not just getting drunk and having sex. At the core of Superbad is one of the best examinations of a friendship I've seen in a teen film. Seth and Evan aren't going to the same college after graduation, and you can tell from the beginning of the film that they're very uncomfortable about that, though they don't know how to broach the subject with each other. They've been friends since elementary school, and they aren't sure if their friendship can survive such a big hurdle. The ways in which the two come to terms with their impending separation is surprisingly touching and at times bittersweet, and it is this element that shines above all others.

Because the friendship aspect is so important, two really strong actors were needed. Hill and Cera do a great job of making you believe they've been friends for years. Hill can be a bit one-note at times, often going over the top. Yet Cera is able to reign him in every time with his subdued, subtler work. Indeed, Cera's Evan really is the funniest character in the movie, though you'd probably not be able to quote his lines like you might with the other characters. Instead, the laughs with him come from the smallest things, like way he looks at things, the way he walks, or the way he reacts to the world around him. The third member of the gang is Fogell, aka McLovin. A lot of people have already proclaimed him the funniest character of the summer. The hype isn't totally warranted, but he is still quite amusing. Had the McLovin jokes not been revealed in trailers, he might have seemed a lot more fresh than he came off as. Still, his story of getting booze for his friends could have felt like a major tangent to the film had newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse not been able to handle it so well, so he deserves some recognition for that.

But above all else, this is a comedy, and a very funny one. I'd say it's probably funnier than Knocked Up was, although it could be close. Even the opening and closing credits are handled in a very funny way. And often the humor is unexpected in that the film never repeat the same kinds of jokes. They hit us with a gross out joke, then hit us with an over-the-top fantasy sequence, then make us laugh at a silly childhood flashback. The film is constantly flowing and surprising, rarely allowing us to guess what jokes could come next. It all works really well, with the disparate jokes never feeling too out of place or contrasting in styles to each other.

While I liked the movie more for its examination of teenage friendship than for its story of a booze search, I can't deny that it all worked very well and I was never bored. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a franchise like American Pie did (the opportunity is clearly there). But then again, Apatow and Rogen have been consistently surprising us for almost a decade now, and if anyone could be trusted to make a sequel that is actually warranted, it'd probably be these guys.

The Bourne Ultimatum

When I first watched The Bourne Identity five years ago, I found it to be a passably fun time, but pretty forgettable. I had no real interest in a sequel and skipped The Bourne Supremacy when it was released. Yet I kept hearing from people who felt the same way as I did about Identity that Supremacy was far and away better than the first. One evening I stumbled across Supremacy on TV and ended up watching it. I was astonished. This was how to make a sequel, I thought. This was Aliens. This was T2. This was Wrath of Khan. A large part of this had to do with the new director to the series, Paul Greengrass. Greengrass understood why so many sequels are awful, and why only a few succeed. A sequel has to be more than just another adventure with the same characters, but a deepening of an audience's understanding of those characters and the world they inhabit. Like Supremacy before it, The Bourne Ultimatum is able to build on what we've seen so far to create a more than satisfying conclusion to an increasingly impressive trilogy.

Ultimatum does something I don't think I've seen a sequel outside of Back to the Future Part II do: it doubles back onto the previous installment, telling us what happened between the final action scene in Moscow and the epilogue in New York. As such, this doesn't feel like a new movie as much as a direct continuation of the last film. If you were to cut off the epilogue and credits on Supremacy and just insert this movie where they were, you'd never even notice that they were two different movies. This means that if you aren't totally up to speed on the last film, you'll be instantly lost. For some this might be a detriment, but to me it's a big plus. Greengrass and Co. assume you are an intelligent viewer who doesn't need everything spoonfed to you, and it makes for a much more fulfilling experience.

The basic premise should be familiar by now. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is an amnesiac hitman trying to find out who exactly he is. At the same time he is trying to evade people who want him dead before he remembers something that might ruin them. Unlike too many franchises, the Bourne trilogy makes a point of not just bringing back all characters who survived previous installments, but showing how their presence in the sequel is significant to Bourne's journey. Everyone has a connection to Bourne's story, and characters who played small parts in the first two installments prove to have a bigger overall role when everything is finally revealed. Take, for example, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles). She seemed so insignificant in the past, yet she kept popping up. This time around we begin to realize that she has a direct connection to Bourne's past that he no longer remembers. Also back is Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA head who realizes that Bourne may not be the villain that her bosses make him out to be. She has proven to be a strong element to this series, and she keeps the scenes not focusing on Bourne interesting and gripping.

If the film suffers, it's with the new cast members. Great actors all around, but none quite fill the void left by people like Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. David Strathairn is the direct descendant of the characters played by Cooper and Cox, but he is never as intense or menacing as his predecessors. Adding a bit of needed gravitas to the villainous side, but with far too little screen time, is Albert Finney, playing a mysterious man who may hold the answers to Bourne's past. Strangely enough, I think that had the two actors switched roles, it would have worked even better. Finney can play menacing much better than Strathairn, while Strathairn can play mysterious with the best of them. Yet this is a minor quibble: both get the job done, and neither is the reason we're watching the movie in the first place.

The action here is the best of the series. Whether it be a cat and mouse game in a train station, or a car chase through New York, Greengrass stages set pieces that leave you breathless. Many people have complained about his shakycam style, and to a degree I understand that complaint. Yet at the same time, it pulls you in so much more because of how real everything feels. The fight scenes, the car crashes: they all feel more impactful, more intense. Sure, on occasion it becomes difficult to tell what is happening, but by and large, things are easy to watch and understand.

What elevates The Bourne Ultimatum above other action films is that it's actually about something. Imagine waking up one day and learning that you used to kill people, some of whom may not have deserved to die. How do you deal with that? The whole trilogy has dealt with that in some fashion, but here it is front and center. Bourne must struggle with the fact that he was once no different from the people being sent to kill him, and that had he not been struck with amnesia, he'd probably be in their shoes trying to kill someone like him. It's an adrenaline fueled morality tale.

I don't know that on its own The Bourne Ultimatum is a four-star film. Yet as a conclusion to a trilogy, it most definitely is. I doubt anyone would watch this as a stand-alone film, so I think the four-star rating is deserved. Few, if any, trilogies raise the bar with each installment, and none really come together as tightly as this one has. Everything falls into place by the end, and this has proven to be a journey I am glad I took part in. There are still a few threads left unfinished, and the possibility of a fourth film is certainly there, but I suspect that this will be the end to the series. Then again, Greengrass has proven he knows how to raise the bar each time, so maybe a fourth one could be a worthwhile experience one day.

Sunshine

Sunshine is a movie that presents an intriguing premise - what if our sun were dying? Unfortunately, director Danny Boyle isn't able to capitalize on that premise in order to make an original film. Instead he has cobbled together elements from 2001, Alien, and Event Horizon (among others) in order to make what feels like a Sci-fi's Greatest Hits movie. If you're a fan of science fiction, you'll have seen this all before. Yet I must confess: in spite of how familiar it felt, I still enjoyed the hell out of this movie.

The movie follows a team of eight astronauts aboard the Icarus II as they travel to the sun with a bomb large enough to reignite the dying sun. They leave behind an Earth nearly frozen and on its last legs. If they fail, everyone is doomed. The pressure is even more intense as they are following in the footsteps of the lost Icarus I, the ship sent years earlier to restart the sun that mysteriously vanished. The crew is made up of your typical archetypes, like the stoic captain (Hiroyuki Sanada), the uncertain science officer (Cillian Murphy), the hot head engineer (Chris Evans), and the shifty doctor (Cliff Curtis). To give away what happens on their trip would be unfair (although not too hard to predict on your own), but suffice it to say, things go awry.

I suppose why I was so engrossed by this movie had to do with the visuals and sound. For such a small budget movie, it looks very impressive. That may be because, unlike Transformers, the visuals aren't the center attraction, but simply used to enhance the film. You appreciate them more because they aren't on screen all the time. The sound is also unusual and intense, creating a feeling of really being on a space ship. All these elements combined to provide a great example of why seeing some movies in a theater is still the best way to watch something.

One thing this movie lacked was a sense of urgency. We're told the world is on its last legs, that these eight people are humanity's last hope. By not seeing Earth during its darkest hour, we have a hard time getting invested in its fate. I got the impression that Boyle wanted this to be Children of Men in space, but it simply lacked that human edge that the other film had. That said, there were little moments of wonder sprinkled throughout that attempted to make things more relatable. Perhaps my favorite of these moments was when the crew flew past Mercury, all wide-eyed with awe. It made me realize that we tend to forget about that planet closest to the sun.

I realize now that many people reading a synopsis of this film might immediately think of The Core, a film with a very similar premise but pointed inward instead of upwards, so to speak. Thinking of that movie might bring to mind images of cheesy disaster flicks, something this is most decidedly not. Boyle made a very strong attempt at creating a scientifically believable film, and I pretty much went along with everything that was sold to me. Indeed, this is a smart movie for the most part, and were it not for the final half hour, it might have been able to overcome its familiar plot points to be a fairly transcendent experience.

Again, I don't want to give away too much, but the film basically presents us with an hour long tense, but thoughtful, movie. Yet the final third becomes something so different from what we've been presented so far that it almost runs the thing off the rails. It's not that the final direction is bad, just that had it been that movie from the start it wouldn't have felt so jarring. Thankfully the movie is able to overcome this plot twist in the final minutes and present a surprisingly resonant ending.

There were moments where I thought that Sunshine could end up among the year's best movies. It may still. I really had a great time with it, and while I felt like I'd seen much of it before, Boyle was able to present familiar scenes and conventions in an exciting way. Were it not for the drastic tonal change in the climax, this would have been a great movie. As it stands, it is simply a fun time at the movies.

*On a side note, I've found that Fox Searchlight has done some of the worst advertising for this movie I've ever seen. In many ways it would be better to not advertise at all than what they're doing. In essence, they've placed ads all over the Internet showing who dies in the movie and how. Please avoid these if at all possible. You may want to see this movie, you may not, you may be undecided. Whatever your stance, seeing how the characters die isn't going to make you want to go if you didn't already, and it ruins much of the impact if you do want to see it.

The Simpsons Movie

About ten years ago they would run a Simpsons version of the THX logo before movies. In it, the audio would be turned up so loud that everyone in the audience exploded - except for Grandpa Simpson, who would yell at the screen "Turn it up!" At twelve years old, my friends and I found that to be the funniest thing imaginable, and the first time we saw it we ended up talking about it more than the movie it was preceding. That really speaks to how big of a cultural phenomenon The Simpsons was in the mid 90's, something that seems to have faltered as the show trudged on, now nearing twenty years on air. Yet in spite of how long the show has been on, or perhaps because of it, The Simpsons Movie is a refreshingly funny and smart film. It's almost as if they used the past 18 years to really come up with something worthy of the big screen.

When Homer Simpson befriends a pig, all hell breaks loose in Springfield. After an unfortunate mistake on Homer's part, the city of Springfield is quarantined inside a giant bubble. Although the Simpson clan is able to escape the bubble, the rest of the city is trapped, and it becomes Homer's duty to free the town before it's too late. In essence, it sounds like a run of the mill episode of the show, yet it isn't. In many ways, this feels surprisingly epic, like it deserves to be seen on the big screen. There's always the argument that TV shows turned movie won't work because no one wants to pay for something they can see for free every week (a fact Homer reminds us in the audience of in a not so subtle way). Yet this film overcomes that by upgrading the animation, creating a plot that really needs more time than 20 minutes will allow, and by trying to make us connect with the characters instead of just laugh with them.

The jokes are fast and furious here. I feel like I was at least chuckling throughout, and there were a number of laugh out loud moments (Bart's nude skating scene provided a great laugh, as well as reminded us why we love The Simpsons - they always mess with conventions). Also, a lot of characters get at least one good joke, either verbally or visually, which is impressive considering the number of characters this show has accumulated. It might have been nice to give some other characters more screen time, like Moe or Mr. Burns. Yet focusing primarily on just the Simpsons was probably a smart move as it made this feel more like a movie and less like a TV show with a lot of asides.

Honestly, if you like The Simpsons you'll like this movie. I was a little worried that it would just feel like a couple episodes cobbled together (like the Family Guy movie), yet it didn't. After seeing it, I actually kind of hope that Matt Groening and Co. realize that it's finally ok to let The Simpsons end on TV, because these characters feel like naturals on the big screen.

Transformers

As I've written before, I hold Jurassic Park to be the quintessential blockbuster of my generation. The sense of pure awe you get from seeing those dinosaurs brought to life on the big screen for the first time is something that has not been matched by any film since. Sure, some have tried (Independence Day, War of the Worlds), but none were able to equal the level of utter wonder of Spielberg's dinosaur film. Until now. While I think Transformers has some deeply flawed elements, it is nonetheless the most jaw-dropping summer blockbuster to be released in the 14 years since Jurassic Park upped the ante on cinematic wonderment.

The story is largely an excuse to find a way to present giant robots fighting each other. Eons ago there were two factions of Transformers: the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, and the Decepticons, led by Megatron. The source of power on their home world of Cybertron was a cube called the Allspark. When Megatron tried to take the Allspark for himself, Prime launched it into space. It eventually found its way to Earth, with the Autobots and Decepticons in pursuit. The only person who holds the key to locating it is Sam (Shia LaBeouf), and both sides race to find him before the other. There are subplots including a love story between Sam and Mikaela (Megan Fox), and a search for the source of an attack on an Iraq base. But really, it's all a set up for the final 30 minute free for all.

I want to get out of the way my two biggest complaints first. One is a problem any casual film goer would probably notice, while the other is something that is from more of a fan perspective (I grew up with the cartoon and toys, although I have only vague memories of most of the story). The problem that should have destroyed the film is the script, which has to be one of the dumbest put to screen in recent memory. When we first meet all the Autobots, we are told they learned how to talk by reading the Internet. The same must be true for whoever wrote the screenplay as not a single character seems to know how normal people speak. The jokes are often painfully bad, more in the vain of inducing groaning than laughter. And did these writers only ever meet one black man in their life? How else to explain that two different black characters treat their mothers/grandmothers in derogatory ways? Yet the film seems almost to be Michael Bay's thesis that in the right hands, the script is completely unimportant. And you know, he provides a strong argument.

The other problem is one that I think a lot of fans feared when Bay said he's the best man to direct this film because he thinks the idea of transforming robots is stupid (this is the same director who gave us such thinking man's films as Armageddon and The Island). As a result, the Transformers take a back seat to the humans. Optimus Prime's first appearance is not for an hour, while Megatron shows up only for the final battle. My own personal problem was the lack of Starscream, the one part of the original Transformers that I strongly remembered and loved. Starscream was Megatron's right hand "man" but always had aspirations for overthrowing Megatron, something he eventually accomplished. Here he shows up only at the end, and has just one line of dialogue. While the film alludes to the tenuous relationship between the two Decepticons, it is not really notable. And really, that is one example of how all the Transformers are treated: we just don't get to know any of them, they are never more than just giant robots. Still, Bay made up for Starscream's lack of presence by giving him the most bad ass moment in the film, as well as leaving open the possibility for a much larger role in the inevitable sequel.

Really, though, everything else works very well. The acting is good, and I am now convinced that Shia LaBeouf will become one of the biggest actors of his generation. He has an undeniable charm, and a real screen presence. The true star, though, is the special effects. Wow. Much like with Gollum or King Kong in recent years, the CG characters become real as the film progresses. And to see multiple CG robots battling it out is truly impressive. Anyone who played with Transformers as a kid will probably remember taking two action figures and smashing them into each other, playing out what in their minds was the most epic battle ever imagined. There is no other way to describe the final 30 minute battle than as Michael Bay transporting our 8 year old imaginations with those toys onto the big screen. And while I was highly skeptical of Bay's decision to focus so strongly on humans over Transformers, it paid off in spades. While I really didn't care about the characters, it gave the film a sense of hugeness, as we saw these robots from human perspectives. When you first see a Transformer transform, it's a jaw dropping experience in part because the characters witnessing it are so amazed. It really is the equivalent to the first time the dinosaurs appeared in Jurassic Park.

I suspect that had it not been so dumb and poorly written, Transformers would be widely considered to be one of the few elite popcorn movies, in the same category as Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Still, it is the closest to that kind of pure entertainment we've had in more than a decade, and my mouth was hanging open for large portions of the run time. Perhaps the biggest sign of this film's place in history was the looks on the kids' faces around me as I left the theater: their eyes were wide open with awe, and as they walked past, one kid said to another "We're watching that again." I got the feeling they saw the same thing I saw when the T-Rex attacked those two cars so many years ago.