
Well, Michael Bay’s “Transformers II” – that is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” indeed turns out to be one of the most visually spectacular films of all time. I saw on a Monday night in a large Regal auditorium with a curved 2.35:1 screen, and I not sure how the cropping maps to Imax 1.44:1. The movie is filmed in many locations, most notably the epic battle near the Pyramids, and the full anamorphic screen seems necessary. The photography is so clear and crisp that it seems like 3-D without glasses; it reminds one of Paramount’s VistaVision or ToddAO, but the credits said Panavision.
“Hiya” Shia LaBeouf plays young hero Sam Witwicky, now entering college as a freshman. One of the best scenes occurs when he visits his dorm room for the first time, and meets his roomie Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriquez) and immediately enters a world of virtual reality, fraternity and probably women. That’s a far cry from my first Sunday move in to a dorm room in 1961 that lost semester at William and Mary.
There are a lot of “creative” ideas with the expanding, fractal robots. In one scene, a bunch of nanocrystals spill onto a floor, glittering, and build up to Christmas-light robots. In another, Sam is pinned down to an examination table, and given an endoscopy by one of the robots that crawls into his mouth and down his esophagus.
There's a scene where Sam gets thrown out of a lecture for going on a fugue and disrupting it with his equations from modern physics. In six years of college and graduate school in the 60s, I saw something like that happen exactly once.
Toward the end, Shia wears a bandage on one hand; it may have been the cast from his auto accident. Brad Pitt had to wear a sling for part of "Se7en" because of a real accident, and Mark Parrish had to wear a leg cast for part of "Mustang Sally" because of a real motorcycle accident.
The final battle scene around the Pyramids featured a "mountaintop removal" from the largest Pyramid, showing an inner "transformer" structure that certainly does not exist.
The premise of the films may not be as fanciful as we think. A history channel Universe program suggested that an extremely advanced civilization could convert itself to robotic life (silicon based) and roam space without the constraints of needing atmosphere and gravity. Such a “life form” would seed other planets and perhaps perform social or political experiments with the people or creatures on various worlds, including us.
The film was produced and distributed as a Paramount/Dreamworks collaboration.
Attribution link for Wikimedia Commons and NASA photo of Europa, moon of Jupiter.