This article has absolutely nothing to do with the overall quality of the films. That was already discussed in my previous blog entry. Although there is ONE thing I'd like to add to it, though: people have been repeatedly telling me that it's a movie about giant robots based off a toy series, so therefore I shouldn't expect much. While that is true, that is also no excuse for the quality of a film. The Dark Knight, for instance, is about a guy in a cape and a batsuit with a clown as a nemesis. Sounds pretty much just as silly as giant robots to me, but Dark Knight was still a masterpiece. So saying I shouldn't be expecting any less from Transformers because of its corny concept is not a valid argument, and from what everyone was telling me about the Transformers movies, I pretty much expected another Dark Knight when I first saw them. Boy, was I disappointed.

Anyways, that's not the main point of this article. The point I'd like to discuss is one of the most overrated aspects of the Transformers movies: the graphics. Before I saw the first movie, I kept hearing many, MANY people say how the graphics of Transformers looked so realistic it was like they actually had the robots on the set with the actors. And when there was a MAJOR ruckus after it lost the Academy Award to Golden Compass for visual effects, I was pretty much expecting the best graphics ever. All the hype about how realistic these robots looked, plus each one having about 10,000 CGI pieces each that all shape and reconfigure when they transform, just kind of built up my expectations.

The result? While the graphics of Transformers aren't BAD, and in fact sometimes rather impressive, all those robots are still obviously CGI in my opinion. Their proportions are too cartoony for them to look at all realistic, and sometimes they're too colorful, thus they don't really blend in the drab, realistic environments very well. Their transformation animations were sometimes rather neat to look at, but when they were in their homonoid forms, their animations were often somewhat stiff and sometimes very jerky. The prime (pun not intended) examples of this are when Optimus Prime and the Fallen duke it out at the end of Revenge of the Fallen, especially during the moments leading up to the now classic internet meme line, "Give me your face". It looked so fake my eyes nearly bled. The forest scene in Revenge of the Fallen was also rather jarring. The real trees and grass doesn't really mix well with the bright, colorful, and very jerkily animated robots. Another example of when the graphics were too cartoony and too fake-looking to be realistic was in the first movie when Optimus Prime and Megatron fell down that giant building after Optimus caught Sam and said "Hold on to the cube!"

I would be fine with this, and probably wouldn't write a rant about it, if everyone had acknowledged the graphics were, at best, about as good as every other summer blockbuster out there, and certainly not anything special. But no. Presumably the Transformers fans all went nuts saying how these robots looked SO FREAKIN' REAL, and how they would sweep away the Oscars when it came to visual effects. I kept hearing people say how they felt like they could touch those robots, how the actors were safe with all the robots, and where they got the money to build highly-realistic robots to act along with the actors. I even heard rumors about how Devestator melted an ILM computer when rendering it in the second one. Look, the rendering of a model, no matter how complex it is, doesn't melt a computer. The thing that melts a computer is overheating, and pretty much all rendering goes at the same consistent speed, no matter how complicated or intricate it is. It might take much longer to do it, but it wouldn't overheat a computer to the point where it'd melt. If it did actually melt, it's the poor quality of the computer rather than the complexity of the graphics.

As for why Transformers lost to Golden Compass for the Visual Effects award, I think it's because of the way each movie presented their graphics. Both were about the same quality when it came to visual effects. But Transformers took its CGI quality and shoved it in our faces, with panoramic, in-your-face shots of them transforming in long, complex shots showing all the intricate detail. Golden Compass, you see, didn't try so hard to show off its graphics: instead, it kinda just flowed it with everything else, and SHOWED us how complex and realistic it looked rather than TELLING us by shoving it up our tails. Imagine it like this: what if you're grading a first-grade science project, and the two top students have equally good projects and good experiments. But while one of them is loud and obnoxious about how great his project was, another simply just showed us how great it was, and let it speak for itself, and kinda just went along with it. Really, which one would you pick for the winner?

That's all I've got. Again, this is all opinion, but I kinda had to let it out after seeing across the internet so many complains about how the Academy Awards snubbed Transformers. To be honest, with its incredibly poor critical reception and being EVEN MORE obnoxious about its graphics, I'd be surprised if Revenge of the Fallen even gets nominated.