It starts out with a socially awkward guy who is in love with a girl who doesn't like him back.
He sees some action toys that he gets that turn to life and are awesome.
These toys have their own back story and bring out humour and action, and are essentially, the film.
Somehow the military get involved.
Through out the film, other side characters get involved including the girl. The boy saves her, and they end up going out with eachother.
Sound familiar?
Yes, it's that 90s film Small Soldiers.
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That was a good film, wasn't it?
Now, lets replace the soldiers with transformers (to add nostalgia or some shit), turn it into something that's come out of Hollywood's vagina, throw up on it, then spray glitter over it.
You get Transformers 1.
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Honestly, I thought that all the way through the film, until towards the end when it started saying some transformers shit I couldn't understand, and the very beginning.
At one point I thought I was watching Small Soldiers, but a very bad version of it.
I don't even need to watch the second one to know it's bad. Transformers 1 was one of the worst films I ever saw.
Who cares?
Transformers came first in the 1980's. I can say Small Soldiers took inspiration from the cartoon first.
The two films have taken in over $1.5 billion worldwide, and we should get hung up over some forgotten film from the late 90's? (Incidently, that was also produced by Steven Spielberg.)
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Yes it was. It was one of DreamWorks earliest films, released together with Universal as I recall. Spielberg often worked with director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Gremlins 2, Twilight Zone.)
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Steven Spielberg IS DreamWorks Pictures.
DreamWorks Animation, you think more of Jeffrey Katzenberg.
DreamWorks music, you look to David Geffen.
Joe Dante directed Small Soldiers because Steven Spielberg hired him to.
I'll say it again - so what?
To say Transformers ripped off Small Soldiers, as another example of Hollywood just ripping off other properties and slapping new labels on them...
They did rip something off, though. It's called - TRANSFORMERS TOYS by Hasbro. Plus the ideas fleshed out by the animated show.
So they borrowed a few plot ideas from Small Soldiers - they also borrowed plot structure from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind( another Spielberg film), with the parallel stories about the Alien visitors being received by regular people(Sam/Roy Neary) while following the progress of the military & establishment to track them down and understand what's going on. They are up front about their inspirations in writing the script.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
No, the point is there is no point. You're bitching and just coming up with reasons not to like it. That's fine, but these particular reasons aren't valid ones.
They also borrowed some ideas from E.T. as well, in Sam's relationship with Bumblebee. But I don't care they did that.
Were films like the first Star Wars and The Matrix just a jumble of ripped off movies blended together, too? George Lucas always gave credit to Kurosawa's 'The Hidden Fortress' for a lot of the plot structure and character ideas; no one calls him a rip off artist for that.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Irrespective of that, Roughrider, you miss the point.
The point is that Transformers had f*** all to do with the Transformers. It may as well havebeen called Small Soldiers.
BayTFs had more in common with Small soldiers than the thing it was based on/sharing a title with....transformers.
And that brown dudes species on the right in that pic looked more like G1 decepticons than Bay's versions do.
Transformers IS Transformers IS Transformers IS Transformers.
It's only the whiny haters here who cry in their milk if everything isn't EXACTLY done as it was done back in the 1980's. It's pathetic to complain so much. Small Soldiers is an incidental film in history; if things were ripped off so much there would have been a court case done by the writers already, and it's never happened. So shove the conspiracy theory.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
"Its only the whiney haters that cry in their milk when someone had an objection to anything bay did ever" would be a similarly fair argument.
(IE totally unfair and stupidly over reductionist)
No one is saying they would want it to be slavishly 1984tastic...
Just that it be faithful to the basics even.
But nooooooooooooooooo.
Some folk'll just put up with Non Biological entities then being biological entities when it suits them, no-mass shifting then mass shifting when it suits bay, not even bothering to get characters right or even finishing what happens to them in a movie, misnaming others, instead of showing transformers we now have teen dating problems, terminators, matrix robot rejects and nanoswarms and loads of other non-TF shit onscreen instead etc.
And thats fine for some I guess.
But those people shouldnt be so quick to declare all critics as biased.
Sometimes great essences are doomed to be shit, when people who had no regard beyond negative ones for the subject matter at hand are allowed to make movies.
And I could have enjoyed a decent, contemporised TFs, but this was shit.
KMC Community Forums
Aug 27th, 2009 03:10 PM
Plus the ideas fleshed out by the animated show.
