Carnivius_Prime wrote:Just got home from watching The Clichéd Adventures of Charlie Watson (and her pet toy robot) at Cineworld Ely. Some of my thoughts:
Perfect title for the film. I agree with most of your criticisms.
Why does Prime already look very much like the red truck he'll take the form of?
The director gave fans what they wanted: G1 Tranformers designs, regardless of whether or not it made sense.
I personally would have liked to have seen G1 designs, but on Earth.
It doesn't make sense for sentient robots on a robot planet to have designs that look like big rig trucks and cassette tape players.
All Transformers now speak english before even coming to Earth. Very jarring in the case of the Decepticons who in previous movies spoke 'cybertronian' most of the time even when on earth. Really lost that nice alien feel that speaking in their own language gave them.
It would have been cool to have all the Cybertronians speak in some kind of digital code, and the visual form of their language be a bunch of zeros and ones, or an alien equivalent of that.
Then have Bumblebee, Shatter, and Drop-Kick quickly learning the English language once they arrive on the west coast by way of scanning the airwaves.
Charlie's family are totally forgettable.
And that Ron guy can **** off with that smile book ****.
They were supposed to be wacky/awkward funny, a continuation of Sam's parents, but they weren't funny at all, and they didn't come across like real people.
Ron was the worst.
Dropkick doesn't really do much except blast a couple humans into watery splashes and do a crap job of killing Bumblebee.
I thought that this was a cheap way to get away with killing characters by having them explode into water.
I'm assuming that if they had a close-up of the human guy looking afraid, and then a close-up of Dropkick's handcannon going off with smoke coming out of the barrel, then the guy's wife screaming, that would be too much for the kids. So better to make murder cartoony!
And it's "justified" because the guy is an idiot and an attempted cheater. Har har.
So much unnecessary teen drama movie crap. We had some of this in the 2007 film but it was done a bit better then. I can't even remember if the 'hot guy' Charlie supposedly liked even did anything apart from be shirtless a couple times and jump off a cliff.
I didn't mind the attempt at teen drama. But it was done in such a cliched, lazy, unrealistic way.
Why does Charlie seem to have no friends? She's funny, charismatic, and attractive. Didn't make sense.
Why is Memo a nerd? He's a tall, good looking dude, and built just like the popular guy. Apparently he doesn't have any friends either.
The female "bullies" are very thin caricatures of rich valley girl-types, not real people, and they say two mean things to Charlie and that's it. It's hard for me as a viewer to care, unlike what 80s protagonists like Daniel LaRusso or Lucas went through.
Movie needs to remind us it's in the 80s by constantly playing well known songs of the decade.
Another lazy approach to making it a period piece. Just play 80s hits back to back, regardless of whether it fits the scene. They could have gone for an 80s styled score like Tron: Legacy or Stranger Things. Or they could have used 80s songs in a better way and more sparingly.
I also thought it was dumb how they had to name drop Alf to once again remind you it's set in the 80s. The old man at the junkyard actually says something like, "I gotta get home early to see what happens to Alf next."
Then we see a scene of Charlie's entire family laughing non-stop at Alf. Really? Alf was a show for kids, middle aged adults weren't laughing or watching the show like that.
And the attempts at humour in this film are mostly pathetic. Same goes for the blatant and hamfisted emotional bits.
Ron especially. I'm guessing he was supposed to be like a Steve Carell-like character, but it was just stupid. No one in the theater was laughing.
Overall, it just felt a little dumb.
Charlie works on the VW bug to get it working again, but doesn't notice anything out the ordinary. Yet, once it's working again and she brings it home, she sees an arm fall out, and a robot face underneath. She didn't notice that before??
"Take me to your leader," and they bring him to some general? Not the President of the United States? They don't really treat alien life coming to Earth as being that big of a deal.