Transmorphers DVD Review

MAGAZINE ISSUE 4

TRANSMORPHERS DVD REVIEW

By: Peter “Pierrimus” Phelps

The Asylum Presents
A LEIGH SCOTT FILM
2005
Run Time: 85 Minutes
Transmasters score (0=stunk, 5=great):

I had read a review for this movie just prior to the TF movie's release and I have to say that I don't agree with it. I was pretty much set to never see this, but when I saw it at my local Hollywood Video I gave it a look. I know this was done in 2005, but there were so many errors that I just did not feel it was a show worth watching. Sure, big robots are in it and they've come from another world to destroy us. They change shape like TFs, but unlike them they mostly seem to be just big walking guns in their alternate forms. I have to wonder if the folks designing the TFs for the movie watched this first since many of our drone characters (Swindle, Dreadwind, etc.) have similar single optic heads.

The thing that got me the most about this movie is how the effects were handled for the human characters. You watch them "fire" their weapons, but half the time you don't actually see anything come out of their guns. The explosions were lame since all you'd see is a ball of fire or the bad bots would sometimes just disappear. Where's the shrapnel and why didn't the explosions effect any of the structures around them? If you look close enough you can see the same rendered city in every shot of the surface level.

OK, so I did like the tower robot's change, having something that big on a battlefield would be intimidating. One of the other problems that broke the illusion of this being a real event was the fact that the larger robots seem to pay no heed to the smaller ones. Which is severely odd since they discover that the smaller ones are the alien race. In one of the images below we have one of the bigger tank bots stepping on a smaller "zbot".

Notice how the same destroyed tower is in both images of the tower robot and in this image of the transmorpher army? For this to work wouldn't the tower robot have to be standing on top of them? Also, the tower robot is in motion, so why would the the destroyed building be in both images above?

The story also just does not jive. The most effective weapon humans have built to fight the robots is a giant electro magnet? What happened to nukes and EMP technology? If humans are living underground wouldn't they set these things off to destroy the robot invaders? Also, they state that the robots have done something to the environment that forces it to rain 24x7. Now I'm not normally so critical of shows, but wouldn't that make the roads, etc. flooded all the time. The ground would be muddy due to the saturation effect and then you've got 50 ton robots walkin around as if the ground isn't wet at all? I've had the unfortunate experience to be up to my hip in mud and let me tell you that it's not fun. You can't move through the stuff very quickly at all and once done, it fills everything up with gunk. At the end the sky clears up within minutes of the destruction of the robots???

To sum up my opinion: Lame.