My copy of the Transformers DVD just came in the mail, and I’m excited to pop the film in and watch it again; the movie has really grown on me in the months since I’ve seen it. I’m curious how it will play on the small screen since the parts that have grown in my mind are not the parts with big action but the ‘smaller’ moments. I think that’s a credit to Michael Bay, since I read the script to Transformers by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and kind of hated it, but that script was there on the screen.
I say this as a way of minimizing the possible negative impact of this announcement: Ehren Kruger is in talks to join Orci and Kurtzman as a writer on the Transformers sequel. Ehren Kruger has written a number of movies, and one of them – Arlington Road – was quite good. The Ring was passable. Every other one sucked so hard that they gave my eyeballs hickies. He wrote Blood & Chocolate, for Christ’s sake. And I know that you have to give screenwriters some leeway – what they write and what ends up on film often have nothing in common. But if Kruger’s work is getting bastardized this badly, he needs to write under a pseudonym. But I suspect that he really needs to write in a bunker 100 miles beneath the surface of the Earth, without any method of passing his writing on to Hollywood producers.
I’m chalking this up to pre-strike madness – the Writers Guild is rumbling about going on strike like ASAP, and not waiting for the Directors and Actors, like everyone assumed, which would mean no new scripts past this month. But even still, can’t Dreamworks-Paramount (the new name!!!) get somebody DECENT on this script? Surely they have the budget. What would be totally dope would be getting John Sayles back into B-movie mode for this one. The paycheck could help fund his next real movie, and Transformers 2 would suddenly have a pedigree.