Robots in da Skies with Diamonds

I was never into Transformers, probably because they started after I done growed up, and because I thought they were pretty gay. Although I do respect the people who actually designed the toys. I messed with one of the large plastic figures quite a few years ago when Kim's nephews were little, and I couldn't figure out how to fold it up into its car form or whatever it was supposed to be. Those were some pretty complex dealy–bobs.

Anyhoo, after reading Home Theater magazine's review of the Blu–ray, we added the movie to our NetFlix queue. We watched it tonight. I thought it was pretty entertaining. Sure, there were a half dozen or so scenes that were super corny and childish, like something right out of a cartoon for 5–year olds. But all in all, it was good action, fully developed characters, and even some pretty good humor here and there. Megan Fox and Rachael Taylor were the hot chicks, and were really quite good for this genre. Shia LaBeouf was pretty funny too.

The CGI is simply amazing. All those parts moving fluidly, and—according to the IMDB trivia page—were all unique movements every time. No cut and paste for the transforming sequence animations. They were formed from between 2000 and 10k pieces. I don't think I ever created a 3D model with more than 100 pieces, much less animate all of them. And I love little details like this, even if I didn't notice it in the movie:

When Frenzy transforms to the CD player after shooting his discs, the display of the CD player reads "NO DISC".

The Blu–ray looked and sounded amazing. The Dolby TrueHD soundtrack truly delivers what the audio people put into the movie. And not once did I see any video compression or motion artifacts, but the Elite helped out there.