We have very vivid memories of the disappointment we felt upon first seeing The Phantom Menace. One of our pals had scored tickets to a late-night showing at the mammoth Ziegfeld Theater, and we ducked out of a raging party just to get our Star Wars on. The lights dimmed and the movie opened not with an action sequence, but rather with a reference to…a trade dispute? Really? Call us old-fashioned, but we prefer space-opera plotlines that eschew the minutiae of import tariffs.
GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, this week’s Bad Movie Friday entry, suffers from a similar problem. This flick should’ve been a slam dunk, especially given the voice talent the producers were able to hire. (We love us some Margot Kidder.) But as the opening clip above shows, the script gets bogged down in the day-to-day grind of engineering. Once the robots start talking about doing a “final installation” on “Plate 4156,” well, you lost us.
Listen, if you’re going to do an animated feature about robots that turn into cars and/or airplanes, something better blow up during the first two minutes of screen time. Or else we walk.
Brian Moore // Apr 19, 2010 at 11:29 am
“something better blow up during the first two minutes of screen time.”
A lesson well taught by the OTHER 80’s movie that had robots that turn into cars and planes, in which they blew up an entire planet in the first two minutes. This appealed greatly to me in the 80’s. I guess it still does.
Brian Moore // Apr 19, 2010 at 11:31 am
“The lights dimmed and the movie opened not with an action sequence, but rather with a reference to…a trade dispute? Really? Call us old-fashioned, but we prefer space-opera plotlines that eschew the minutiae of import tariffs.”
Oh, and have you seen this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
Brendan I. Koerner // Apr 19, 2010 at 9:16 pm
@Brian Moore: That guy’s a bit more extreme in his condemnation, but I have to say, he’s in the ballpark.
I saw “Revenge of the Sith” at a matinee in Norman, Okla. It was just me and one other dude in a theater that seated 200. He sat about 20 rows in front of me. During the Skywalker-Padme “You’re so beautiful” scene, he turned around to me and yelled, “Can you believe this shit?”
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my entire life.
Brian Moore // Apr 20, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Haha, I had precisely the same reaction.