Review Detail

9.1 15 10
FanFix June 25, 2012 3400
(Updated: August 28, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
8.0
November 26, 2008

Nicely done, sir. On a technical level, I can’t think of a single criticism. Everything was seamless, and extremely professional. Your choice of what to cut/what not to cut was a bit more of a mixed bag for me…

Let me start by saying that this cut is definitely an improvement over the original. However, I think more could be done. I see this movie as having 4 distinct parts, the robots (duh), Shia and his family, the military, and the NSA/Sectoin 7. When I first saw this movie in the theater all of these parts worked for me except one… the NSA/Section 7. This part was uniformly horrible. Jon Voight was terrible, John Tuturro was terrible, they British girl’s dialogue was terrible, and Anthony Anderson was mostly just annoying. Also, nothing interesting (read no action) takes place during 95% of these scenes. Therefore, I still have major problems with how much of them you left in. These scenes should all be cut to literally the bare minimum. There should be no throw away lines, because quite frankly every single line that isn’t required for the scene or the plot to make sense should be thrown away. I’m not going to make an exhaustive list (even though I’d like to), but I will point out that you can (and should) completely throw out the girlfriend’s “criminal past”. You cut out almost all of Shia being mad about it anyway, so you may as well cut it and save a few dozen lines of poorly written/delivered dialogue. Beyond that though, you should have cut the little girl taking her tooth out from under her pillow. It’s pointless if you’re not going to have her say the tooth fairy line. Also, if possible you should cut the whole credit card/ Indian customer service rep thing. There’s really no reason to cut away from the battle if you can help it. There’s also a shot when they’re trying to make contact from under the damn where Jon Voight seems to just randomly shoot into the pile of stuff they have blocking the door. For some reason it really jumped out at me as seeming weird.

As far as thing I wished you had kept… the “it’s Japanese” line (probably the funniest line in the movie)… the “cool mom” line (sometimes you need a character in the movie to say exactly what the audience is thinking, and I don’t know how your inner child wasn’t thinking how awesome it would be to actually see giant robots fighting each other)… the advertising bots (if I remember correctly, the “Dew-bot” shot cans like they did in the commercial, which I loved)… “I’ll drive, you shoot” ( Ihonestly don’t care about this line one way or the other, but the way you cut it together just doesn’t make me feel that it makes sense for them to drive back out there, when It did before. Honestly, I don’t see why you bothered).

Overall, I’d have to say that this was really well done and enjoyable to watch. I see that you intend to make a few more cuts of this film, and I imagine that some of my concerns will be addressed in one or the other (though I doubt you’ll be adding any comedy back in). But as of now, all I can do is rate what’s before me… 4 stars. Good Job.
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