Screen Junkies posted this video on YouTube today and when I first watched it, I felt angry and needed to write my reaction. Take a look if you want:
After watching it again to get my thoughts in order for this post, I found that I wasn’t too annoyed by all of the suggestions, but most were ridiculous. First of all, who the heck is Nick Mundy and what makes him worthy of presenting these suggestions. Seriously, I’ve never heard of the guy. My impression is that he’s a loud-mouth who is trying to be one of those comics that gets laughs by being angry and loud. It doesn’t work, especially since these aren’t particularly original ideas. Even Hal Rudnick, the host seemed to be completely uninterested, bordering on annoyed. I can’t tell if he’s just not into Transformers or if it’s his guest. Anyway, here are the suggestions presented in the video.
1. Stop Trying To Be Funny
Nick, take your own advice! We all love the action and the CGI effects are great, but when watching a two and a half hour movie, it’s nice to throw in some humor. Besides, every Transformers cartoon or comic that I have watched or read (which is a lot), there have been funny parts. in fact, one of the reasons that the More Than Meets The Eye (MTMTE) comic series is so popular is the blend of action, drama and humor.
Also, will everyone stop calling Jazz and the Twins, Mudflap and Skids “racist”? They aren’t. Stereotypes, sure, but not racist. While the Twins were a bit over-the-top, these were all interesting characters that had personality.
2. Give The Transformers Personality
Seriously? Did you just say that after bashing Jazz and the Twins for exactly that? They use Bumblebee as an example and fail. If you can’t describe Bumblebee more than “yellow” and “autistic robot who can control the radio” which isn’t racist, but it’s still offensive, how can you deride the films for being “racist” and then make similarly offensive comments in this video?
However, this point does have some merit when referring to other background bots like Jolt and Dino.
3. Give The Characters Personalities
While complaining about this, you just describe those characters’ personalities. You also forgot about Agent Simmons who was oozing personality and brought that humor that you hate so much.
4. Don’t F**k Up The Dinobots
I’ll give you this one – I agree. From what we’ve seen so far, I know a lot of GEEWUNNERS are going to complain, but I think the Dinobots look good and have great toys (at least in the Generations line). I do hope that the Dinobots don’t just show up at the end for the final battle and have a larger part in the movie. We can’t judge based on the trailers because the studio could very well be holding back details (like the fact that we haven’t seen Drift or Hound yet).
5. Show Us The Action
Yes, the action cuts quickly, but that is how A LOT of action sequences are shot. If it’s just a wide shot of a battle, then it can get boring real quickly and make you feel like you’re watching a sporting event from the nose-bleed seats. I agree with the intent, but this really isn’t a problem, just something for a loud-mouth to complain about.
6. No More Love Stories
Agreed. Next!
7. Give Someone Else A Shot (At Directing)
I agree. It would be very interesting to see another director’s vision. Then again the grass is always greener.
I was thinking of adding some suggestions of my own, but then I realized that there’s nothing to fix. The three previous movies have all been box office successes and, with the humongous amount of anticipation for this fourth film, I expect it to be successful as well. After raking in billions of dollars, I find it hard to think of this movie series as needing to be “fixed”. Remember, these are summer blockbuster movies that aren’t supposed to be Academy Award contenders – they are supposed to thrill us with special effects and explosions, which is exactly what they do. Finally, above all else, these movies are meant to get us to buy toys. They tend to do that pretty darn good too.