Space Junk

This weekend I watched two movies I had no intention of seeing but kind of thought "why not" and did. To paraphrase Stewie in Family Guy, I watched them because there was a lot of color, shapes and movement to hold my attention. Those two movies were blockbusters from last summer, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Transformers. Despite being made by different people and existing as two separate franchises, I felt as if I had seen the same movie twice when I was done. Let's check off the reasons why:

• Both movies involve the end of the world as we know it
• Both movies have a heavy military presence
• Both movies hinge the fate of the world on the gumption of a young man
• Both movies star actresses whose main contribution consists of heaving bosoms in super tight clothing while kicking ass
• Both movies feature vehicles galore
• Both movies involve an enemy from space
• Both movies feature heavy damage to buildings, cities and vehicles
• Both movies play up a big act of sacrifice
• Both movies have missles, missles, missles!

So what differed between the two? Well, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer can make the dubious distinction of saying it was better than the first Fantastic Four movie. The only geek-tastic moment was the unveiling of the Fantasticar, which was great until I saw it had been product placed by Dodge. Great, the Fantastic Four is built ram tough and will need a trade in after 30,000 miles. Even the iconic Silver Surfer can't keep things going, though it did leave me with a need to play Joe Satriani more often.

For Transformers, it was directed by Michael Bay and you know what that means. It means if this was a sentence directed by Michael Bay, it (cut to next shot) would (cut to next shot) have (cut to next shot in slo mo with unnecessary camera movement) a (cut to oversaturated orange colored shot with more unnessary camera movement) lot (cut to shaky handheld point of view shot) of overdirection with the attention span of a five year old. But kudos to Shia LeBouf for running and yelling like the action hero in training he is (he'll appear in the new Indiana Jones movie next).

Whats sad is that both movies were junk and not even in a so-bad-it's-good way. I even enjoyed the cartoon Transformers movie more than these films, at least that one had the voices of Judd Nelson and Orson Welles plus the lame animation from the tv series to give a sense of continuity. As much money as was spent on making both these features, the end result was much less than meets the eye.