Concerning Transformers

I had it on good authority from Greg that the new Transformers movie was good. Greg is almost as much of a fan of the series as I was, which is to say that he saw every episode, watched every movie, and owned every toy. I think that his toy collection dwarfed even my own, something I have yet to forgive him for. I was on the fence about seeing this movie for a while - if it had been done poorly I would have walked out of the theater looking like I had just been raped, and indeed in some way I would have been. I have a strong attachment to the Transformers, one that you likely won't be able to understand unless you're a geek that was born in the early 1980s.

Let me break it down for you like this: imagine you're a fundamentalist Christian. As a fundamentalist Christian you believe certain things, you have a certain spiritual connection with an ideology, and you are a pretty big fan of Jesus. Transformers, to the early 1980s geek, is kind of like that. Just replace Heaven with Cybertron, God with the Allspark, and Jesus with Optimus Prime, and you're halfway there.

There's actually some shocking parallells between Jesus and Optimus Prime. Both were moralistic, both were concerned with the salvation of humans, both had high-powered energy weapons (well, I'm assuming Jesus had access to them, even though he'd never actually use them) and both died and were resurrected, in the case of Optimus Prime more than once. Jesus could turn water into wine, Optimus Prime could turn into a pretty cool semi. As far as I'm concerned, the two are pretty much even.

Anyway, religious metaphors aside, the Transformers movie didn't piss all over my childhood memories, which I'm thankful for. I only noticed one major error (the tank gave its name as Devestator, which was in fact the unified form of the Constructicons - the tank was supposed to be Brawl) and the deviations from canon worked within the context of the film (no Ark, Megatron is some sort of aircraft as opposed to a gun (making him a little closer to Galvatron) and Bumblebee was a Camaro and not a Volkswagen). I walked out of the theater feeling disappointed that the SUV that drove by was never going to turn into a giant robot and start wrecking up the place.