Friday, June 26, 2009

Transformers Review

Master J has been begging Mister C & I to take him to see the new Transformers movie. Mister C had bought the first one and we all really liked it. Although there were a few language incidents, overall it was a good movie. And Master J loved it. He's seen it probably a dozen times. So when he saw a trailer for it one day, he decided he just had to see the new one.

Mister C & I generally try to make sure that what our kid watches is something that we feel is appropriate for not just his physical age, but also for his emotional age. So we told Master J that we would preview the film first and then decide if it was okay for him to see.

Not so much.

First of all, the language incidents had increased about 100 fold. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I don't think 10 minutes went by without someone swearing. I'm no prude, I probably have a worse mouth than most, but I don't do it around my kid. And I don't need it in order to tell a story. When a movie has that much swearing in it, it's usually because they don't have any better dialogue.

Secondly, why oh why do we have to have so much sexual innuendo in a movie whose target audience is the 6-10 set? To be clear, there was no nudity at all. But, there was a lot of suggestion and situations that definitely were geared to a higher age bracket.

Third, the violence. Yeah, I get that the whole premise of the movie is the battle between good and evil. But goodness, could we take a breather? I mean, if I took the time to figure it out, I'm fairly certain that 90% or better of the movie was actual fight scenes. Considering that this movie was at least 2 hours and 15 minutes long, that's a lot of violence in one sitting.

Fourth, and this is just me being petty, why on earth did Meghan Fox get her lips done? She was gorgeous as it was, she didn't need to make herself look like she got popped in the mouth at a bar fight. It was somewhat distracting that every time she was in a scene (which was most of the movie) I was more focused on the size of her lips than what was coming out of them. Maybe that's not a bad thing.

Overall, it wasn't a horrible movie. I've certainly seen worse ones, Redneck Zombies comes to mind. The plot was fairly decent and the acting was consistent. It was nowhere near as good as the first one. I will most likely never have a desire to see it again. Most importantly though, I won't be taking Master J to see it. I'm sure I'll get some flak about how I'm sheltering him or being unrealistic about what he's exposed to. But I'm okay with that.

So I guess Master J will be disappointed in the morning when he finds out we won't take him to the movie. On the bright side, Mister C & I got to have an actual date for the first time in forever. So "Decepticons, Rock on!"

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