starfish wrote:Scatterlung wrote:All the mansions and money in the world wouldn't stop poor ol' Miss Hilton getting her head flattened with a sledge hammer. This isn't about the quality of what she buys or what she does with her money, its what the money says about her.
You're saying that money = quality. But quality isn't defined by money, ever. Trainers are made for a few pennies by children in some third-world country, and then sold for ridiculous prices in the West, because they are automatically brilliant trainers upon import? No, because someone said they would sell for that much and somehow, were right.
Money does not define quality. Gold and diamonds sell for high prices because they are good quality materials? No. They're just rare. And then it is human beings who say what is rare is valuable. The actual materials themselves have been virtually useless in human history, with gold making a marginal appearance in electronics in recent years.
Value and worth is not applied by the sum of the materials within an item, just by the amount that a human being pins on it. An item may be of high quality, as indicated by its price, but it is down to human opinion whether they are worth buying, rendering the price of it completely moot.
The fact that Transformers has a lot of money put into it means nothing. Megan Fox is, to the harshest critic, utterly talentless, yet she made a truck load of money out of these films. A sign of quality? Couldn't possibly be. The only reason the film grossed so much is because people like giant fighting robots, awesome CGI, and Megan Fox's boobs. Maybe she is a "high quality" female, a human commodity, but you have to ask yourself whether or not you yourself wish to make qualitative judgements based on something's monetary value, or your own opinion.
To be honest, I don't really get what your point is - essentially (if I've read your posts correctly) the crux your argument is this: why pay for a Classics Skywarp when you can get a Starscream of identical quality for far less cash?
But that's completely irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. I was just saying that it's grossly unfair to compare the quality of ROTF with the quality of the 1986 animated movie. True, the fact that Bay had much more in the way of resources available to him doesn't necessarily equate to a good film (take Pearl Harbour as a case in point), but there are plenty of other reasons why the comparison is unfair - the 86 Movie was specifically aimed at children, whereas ROTF was going for an older, more discerning audience (hence Bay's use of risqué language and 'adult' humour). Bay hired many, many skilled animators, actors and technical staff at their top of their game. The CGI is amazingly excellent. The sound design has been almost universally praised. That such craftsmanship was wasted on such a dismal plot smacks to me of an incredible wasted opportunity.
However, I realise I've been really negative towards the film in my earlier posts, so I'm now going to accentuate some of the positives.
Firstly, Megan Fox. I'm sorry, but she simply does not deserve all the terrible criticism that's been levelled at her. Put simply, the character as written is pretty one-dimensional, and given nothing to do other than pout. Even the best actor in the world would struggle with the material that Fox was given - it's quite simply a terrible, terrible part as written. Personally, I think she does quite well under the circumstances.
Secondly, someone upthread moaned at the prominence given to human characters in a film that's supposed to be about Transformers. I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. I think the balance is exactly right. The problem with CGI robots is that, no matter how good the animation and the voice artist, Transformers simply cannot emote particularly well. As a poster said above, the best scenes in all the films were those involving the human beings, because it's the human beings who provide all the emotion. I felt nothing for Jazz's death at the end of the first movie, simply because the filmmakers were unable to demonstrate Prime's grief at all well. But when Mikaela thinks that Sam's dead, it's a whole different ball game. Say what you will about the plot holes, but without humans as the central characters, the film would be emotionless and sterile.
So yeah, there were bits of the film I liked. On a technical level, it's a tour-de-force. The actors give as good as they possibly can. It sustains the interest - it's certainly not a dull film.
Which just makes it all the more galling for me that the film fails in just one crucial area -
the plot.
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
