A good comparison would be the latest Transformers, which destroys Chicago anew, and Marvel’s The Avengers, which destroyed a carefully limited section of New York. Both had the dazzling visual effects that have become standard fare for summer pop-corn flicks, but Avengers spent more time developing the characters first. We grew to care for these fictional people enough that the outcome of the story mattered to us, because their struggles as individuals mattered to us. The Transformers failed to do that.

With Transformers, the only characters repeated from the earlier three films are the robots, and not even all of them are familiar. There was too little time spent establishing the story’s characters as individuals, so I found myself disappointed. What little character development there was seemed intended merely to cue us as to which pigeion-hole archetype each character fits into.

Ultimately, of course, Hollywood will continue to create whatever sells well. In time, enough people may grow jaded to such fare and take a renewed interest in more thought-provoking movies again.

;^) By contrast, our family watched A Beautiful Mind for the first time the other day, having picked it up from a bargain bin a while ago. This is not an action film, and even what action there is isn’t what it seems at first. The story partly a mystery, but even that takes you by surprise. I don’t want to spoil things for folks who haven’t seen it, so I won’t detail things much, but the twists and turns in the story left me uncertain how things were going to turn out. And I cared how it turned out. I wanted Russle Crow’s character to prevail over his situation, because I’d grown to care for him as the story unfolded.

Movies need more of that, man. Even the blockbusters.