Movie Review: "Transformers" at IMAX

That's right. You read the title correctly, and you'd better believe I'm gonna go there.

I decided this past Saturday that I needed a respite from my rigorous college-football-watching schedule and went with a bunch of guy friends to check out "Transformers" on IMAX. Something about throwback movies based on favorite childhood cartoons brings guys together. I can't explain it.

It's cliched, I know, but I guess in some ways we're all still children at heart, and "Transformers" has this inexplicable way of being almost generationally defining -- not in the sense that Vietnam defined a generation...please, I'm not stupid enough to make that poor of an analogy -- in the sense that if the Transformers cartoon gets brought up in a conversation, all guys in the group who watched it as a kid automatically belong to an unspoken brotherhood. Or how about the one kid in intermediate school who inevitably wrote his "My Hero" report on Optimus Prime.

Anyway. Transformers. Important to my generation. Not the point of this entry.

I like to think as I've gotten older and supposedly more mature (that's debatable), I've come to enjoy movies for any of the following reasons: good humor, good dialogue, character development, intricate plot lines, the ability to engage me emotionally...and sure, maybe even the chance to sit around afterwards and talk about it with friends and family.

"Transformers" had none of these, yet I still enjoyed it, because I got exactly what I expected when I walked in: poor dialogue, cheesy lines, zero character development (I walked out of the theater wondering why they couldn't have at least delved into the hidden complexities of Starscream's brooding character a bit more), a plot line that had me continually asking "Wait, couldn't they just have...?" and "How were they able to...?", and characters that could have all died and I could have cared less, with the exception of Optimus Prime. It was 2+ hours of action, explosions, car chases, and CG robots duking it out, and it was awesome. Don't think we weren't cheering periodically throughout the movie. That's really all there was to it.

More than meets the eye? Not even close.

But that's not why I went.