While Nykolai was away at Underbank Stud for his first week of school holidays, Kitt and I went to see the Transformers movie. Wow. I was very pleasantly surprised. For once, here’s a Michael Bay movie that’s actually really quite good.
It has some teen angst moments (could have cut about 1/2 of them down in size and still been a good movie), some Herbie Goes Bananas moments and an absolute shitload of action. As Kitt said, if you weren’t laughing at something funny, you were going “Hell yeah!!!!” at the action.
There were some majorly obvious flight-geek faults in the movie, specifically:
- The Predator UAV they send in to observe a battle zone is going in at dune-top altitude instead 10,000 feet or so
- When they call in a BlackHawk to medivac the troops, a UH-1 Huey turns up – aside from the naming problem, the US has no Hueys in the desert theatres
- Despite showing AirForce1 as a 747 in the air, on the ground it has become a 707 (based on the wings, tail & engines shown during “on the ground” scenes)
- When they summon jets to provide air support, they show the pilots jumping in the aircraft when they’d already be in the air – it takes a while to start up systems, initialise INS/GPS/NAV systems, etc :)
Despite all this, the movie kicks butt and is a lot of fun to see. If there are moments when you think you’d rather be somewhere else, just ride through it and wait ‘cos it’s going to get better real soon. If push comes to shove, the “leading ladies” aren’t bad eye candy, that’s for sure…