It’s hard for me to enjoy a movie based on a line of toys, particularly a line of robot toys.   I’m older than sandstone for Christ’s sake. All we had to play with when I was a kid was the occasional stick or Fla-vor-aid bottlecap.  If you were rich, you might have a petrified grapefruit that would serve as a softball, or an axle shaft from a scrapped Ford Torpedo Runabout to use as a bat or hockey stick. As you might imagine, given my history, it is  hard for me to relate to a movie about a bunch of  ultra-sensitive automaton characters who all have names pulled right out of a 1985 issue of Byte magazine.

When these sonofabitches transform however, I must admit it is quite impressive.  I wondered while I was watching the movie  how many UNIVACs they had to string together to render all the little whirling gears, spinning frammistats, and hydraulic cylinders.  And when a couple of robots started to fight, forget it.  I was out of the loop.  I couldn’t tell you what in Beelzebub’s ballbag was going on.  To be honest, every hand-to-hand robot battle looked like a couple of  junkyards fucking.

Most of this movie involves the main characters  running and dodging impossibly thick clouds of bullets, debris and shrapnel from the robot skirmishes.  No wait, I take that back.

That’s the premise of the entire movie.

I had lots of logical questions to ask too while I watched (like why do these super advanced alien cyberbeings, who traveled to earth from another galaxy, use conventional missiles and ballistic type weapons?  I mean, wouldn’t they use something crazy like android jizz cannons or bionic plasma hoses or some shit?)  Then I had to remind myself, our whole reality here is based on a line of toys.  Questions like those have no place in this realm.

I hope this doesn’t spawn a whole bunch more goddamn toy movies.  I sincerely doubt it.  I mean, what could possibly come next from Hasbro?  GI Joe?  Don’t make me laugh.

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