Haven't seen it. I've heard good reviews, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
I felt Blomkamp could do it ever since I saw this:
For me, the definitive Spielberg sci-fi film is ET, and while it has the same child-like wonder that a director would need for a film like TRANSFORMERS, I just can't see the transition. ET is such a brilliant film because the entire thing is shot from a child's position - no adult's face is ever seen in the film. Spielberg deliberately positioned the camera to be at Elliot's head height and kept it there.
We must have seen different versions, and I have the 20th Anniversary edition with two versions included.
He's only bee producing it - taking the same role as Spielberg did in the TRANSFORMERS films.
As it hasn't been picked up his ultimate role isn't decided and there's been rumors of him possibly directing, or someone like Blomkamp.
He could, but if you follow his trajectory of films, he's gradually gone from the storytelling of ALIENS to the technical complexity of AVATAR. It's evident as early as TERMINATOR 2, with the concentration on the special effects of the T-1000.
I suggest a look at his non-fiction films. Aliens of the Deep is a documentary designed to leave the viewer in a state of wonder as they see things never even imagined before.
I don't. I just have a hard time seeing how other directors could have done the project and still retain my inner nine-year-old's imagination.
Well, maintaining the characters' integrity would be a good start. My inner five-year-old walked out of the first film thinking that this is Transformers in name only. I watched what were supposed to be soldiers in a covert role turned into a vaudeville act, and literally get peed on. I watched a story about these alien robots and their interaction with a few human allies turned into a teen romance.
Of course, he could have also made the whole thing better by not shaking the camera around during action scenes, and getting some real acting out of his cast. Jon Voight mailed it in, Torturro wasn't necessary in either film, and the rest of the supporting cast were clearly not chosen for their talent. And more than half of them were throwaway characters that added nothing to the story. But now this is me asking Michael Bay to recognize general good quality movie-making skills.
I know I only watched some of G1 Season 2 last week, and its been a while since I read an issue of the comics on my PSP's digital comics reader, but what I see in those things and what I see in Bay's films are similar in name only.
TRANSFORMERS needed an origin story. We needed an introduction to the mythology. Before you can explore the implications of the civil war, you need to establish who is who and that sort of thing. It's not about breadth, it's about establishing enough depth so that when you do get to the point where you can start exploring the Cybertronian war, it doesn't all collapse in on you.
Nearly the first half hour of the first film focused on Sam, his parents, and Mikaela. The introduction to the mythology and characters was done in one scene where Optimus introduced everyone, they all acted like imbeciles, and then Optimus projected a hologram of the Cybertron backstory on the ground. Then we got a bit more as Jon Voight mumbled through the story of Megatron and the cube's discovery. That bit threw me off completely because apparently arctic temperatures can freeze a Transformer, but the near absolute zero of space has no effect on them as they fly from planet to planet.
I feel as if a focus on the robots, not some romance story that no one cares about, would have given us a proper back story to branch out from.
TRANSFORMERS, I think, did enough to be a solid foundation, even if it wasn't perfect. We found out enough about the characters and their motivations so that when the sequel came about, we knew the status quo.
That Megatron and Starscream dynamic was fleshed out so well with that one line of dialogue between them.
And at the most basic story level, REVENGE OF THE FALLEN had some good stuff in it (the Decepticons bring the Fallen out of exile to gain the upper hand in their war with the Autobots - it's almost like THE DARK KNIGHT in the way the mafia allied themselves with the Joker to bring down Batman).
I thought Fallen was supposedly always behind the scenes pulling strings? Megatron even calls him master and immediately begins taking orders from him after being revived. That is why I felt The Fallen was so poorly executed. It would be like finding out the emperor exists midway through The Empire Strikes Back. Megatron was supposedly leader of the Decepticons, then suddenly he is taking orders as well. Of course The Fallen turned out to be exceptionally weak and pointless overall. Just another forgettable side character given too much (any) screen time.
It isn't as if they needed to make the story up. It already existed in a fairly usable form.
The story was stopped and started for the action scenes (which is occasionally okay when it's called for, like when the Autobots evacuate Sam through the forest), or worse, important story sequences were shaved down in favour of more action.
This is the second biggest problem in Hollywood right now, as I see it. Directors and writers have forgotten what organic action means. A forced action scene that doesn't make sense has no role in a movie, no matter how well executed that scene is.
I can see where that might happen - scenes like the super-fine transformer infiltrating Diego Garcia show a real imagination (largely because of the way it's so thin it's almost invisible) - but Bay's influence on the script seems to have been things that are secondary. Like the Twins; you could cut them out without affecting anything in the story too much. If he interfered, it was only in things that didn't really matter too much and were just fairy floss. I don't think his meddling in the script was as bad as, say, Lee Tamahori in DIE ANOTHER DAY (seriously, his grubby fingerprints are all over that film). The other variable in REVENGE OF THE FALLEN seems to be the introduction of Ehren Kruger. He's the only thing that really changed between the two films, so I suspect he may have had a hand in things.
As I said before, I would be willing to blame Orci and Kurtzman more, if their non-Transformers track record wasn't much better. Either they just don't get Transformers at all and have little respect for the source material (but were almost the exact opposite on Star Trek?), or Michael Bay isn't translating their script to screen well. Sure Kruger is the new factor in Transformers 2, but to me Transformers was poorly done and Revenge of the Fallen just felt like a usual case of horrible sequel following a bad film.
I'll have a look if and when I can. In the meantime, what did you think of my reimagined Fallen? And Shockwave being imprisoned in Chernobyl; I thought that was one of my more lucid moments.
It is better than what we will get and works with what we have been given. But I personally have been worn out on the concept that Earth and Cybertron have had all these connections for years. Too much coincidence in a universe the size of ours.
That's what I was talking about when I said I didn't think Cameron would be right for TRANSFORMERS, in the sense that "right" means they could deliver more than Bay did. I can't help but think that Cameron would concentrate too much on the robots - not in the sense that he would explore them as characters, but that the emphasis would be on the technical qualities of the film. As an audience, we'd probably be expected to sit there and go "Oooooh, look at how they did that!" and "Aaaaah, isn't the CGI so fantastic?" while everything else - plot, character, even action (and by this I don't just mean your traditional action scene, but any action being performed by anyone) -would be pushed to a secondary role.
I think that would be the result if this were made when the CGI being used was new. But now he wouldn't have a new toy to focus on as much and it would give him room to focus on them as characters.
By the way, why is Cameron expecting us to focus on the technical expertise worse than Bay expecting me to marvel at his pyrotechnics? Sure, when Cameron does it he rehashes an old story style, but at least it is mostly coherent.
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All that is left is plot and the Transformers films forgot about that too. 
