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Friday, July 1, 2011

Of robots, monsters and critics


I seem to have developed an annoying habit of late. Reading movie reviews. So before I start off on this rather frustrated rant, a word to young impressionable movie goers who want to maybe read an expert’s take on the movie before they actually watch it: Don’t! Ok, maybe those are two words, but let’s not get hung up on technicalities. 

The reason for such a seemingly unreasonable outburst? Probably the silly, motion picture saturated old men (and women) who like to call themselves critics. Now this is a rather harsh generalization, some of them are probably nice people who enjoy knitting and have cats, but sometimes it’s just hard to care.

Now this particular criticism deals with action movie reviews, usually from a really popular franchise, and how they are more often than not panned with stuff like ‘cheesy plot’, ‘just an unbelievable borefest filled with CGI pyrotechnics’, and my personal favourite: ‘Godzilla’s physical size varies between scenes!’

Having seen X Men: First Class and Transformers: Dark of the Moon recently, it’s a little hard to relate to the views aired by our rather experienced reviewers. While the former escaped their scrutiny relatively unscathed, Transformers did fall victim to some of the aforementioned comments about plot and relying on CGI, not to mention Michael Bay’s affection for blowing things up. But the fact is, while every last thing they say may be true, no one really cares. After all, people don’t go to see Transformers for refined method acting and a taut script do they?

The only important thing here is the images left behind by these films. If a movie can leave a memory in the viewer’s mind that will remain there for years to come, that is a success in my book. It means that the filmmakers, whatever other flaws they may have, have succeeded in what they set out to do. And I’m sure that most people will agree when I say that a generation got its money’s worth when Magneto lifted a whole submarine out of the sea and left it hanging, that we all shifted to the edge of our seats in those frozen moments when a semi transformed Bumblebee reached for an airborne Sam. And we smiled with childish amusement that Michael Bay could not help himself, even as his female lead looked out upon the chaos of the battlefield in a rare moment of calm, to put an exploding car in the background.

Because that’s all we want to see when we go to watch these movies. The very people who are abused for making these movies gave us what we wanted to see. We saw giant robots beating each other up, we saw Godzilla sink a claw into the Empire State building and roar majestically as lightning speared in the background. We saw some of cinema’s greatest moments. So if you are one of those people who has a tendency to whip out a ruler and measure a giant lizard as it crawls through a city sewer, please just stay at home and let the rest of the world enjoy it.
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