Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Fate Told Me Not To See Transformers

I probably should have seen it coming.

Prior to watching Transformers last week, there were several signs on the day telling me that I should've given the movie a miss, and save my money for something else. The first signs were reviews - two reviewers that I trust (Roger Ebert and Paul Rodgers of "Careful With That Blog, Eugene") both gave the movie terrible reviews.

Yet despite this, I knew that I couldn't believe it. The second sign was the Herald Sun review. Normally, I don't trust the words of Leigh Patsch, due to him spending more time summarizing the movie than actually talking about the pros or cons of the movie. Patsch gave the movie the same score as the Hannah Montana movie (released on the same day). Now I was curious.

Hell, previously I was willing to pay money now not for entertainment, but now? It was just to see just how bad Transformers really was. Yet the signs kept coming.

The fourth sign was the IMAX. Let me explain, my friend and I had decided that we were going to catch the movie at Melbourne's IMAX theater in Carlton, if anything for the experience. When we got there, the session had been completely booked out. Granted, this was probably my fault for not booking in advance and not thinking that such a thing would actually be booked out.

Yet we kept persisting. I had brought a copy of the MX Newspaper (it's the free paper you get at various train stations around Melbourne), which had actually contained sessions times for a vareity of cinemas. We then decided to hit up Hoyts Melbourne Central, due to it being close to IMAX Melbourne as well as the next session being somewhat closer (we got there at around 5:30pm, the session was at 6:15).

After a brief walk, we got to Hoyts with plenty of time to spare, only to have been met with the fifth sign - a stupidly long line. Granted, this was to be expected somewhat. After all, it's a Thursday night in the city, and the movie has been highly anticipated. Yet the line moved slowly...and I was annoyed that I wasn't going to get a spot in the cinema. We waited for around 20 minutes in line before we finally paid for our tickets, which lead to the last sign.

You see, when we had gotten to the ticket booth, we were given several options as to where to sit, thanks to the theater already being booked out. Specifically, we had told the woman in the booth that we had wanted a seat in the middle of the theater. We were given a front row ticket. Faantastic.

Then we saw the movie...which I'm sure you can read all my thoughts about.

Though it wasn't all bad. After the movie, we caught up with George Matthews of Australian Gamer (a site I love), and went out for some drinks and a meal. Was fun, more than made up for it.

Just goes to show that sometimes, it's not the destination that matters, but the journey to get to the destination.

1 comment:

Zurahn said...

I really don't understand the popularity of the Transformers movies. Aside from even the critical failures, it just doesn't strike me as a mainstream franchise.