IRON INVADER (aka SPACE TRANSFORMERS) (a review)

IRON INVADER (aka SPACE TRANSFORMERS) (2011) (a review)

This is basically low budget rip-off of Transformers. Giant mechanical monster...people running around...B-actors...bad script with lame dialog... I'll give the movie one thing -- it makes you appreciate Michael Bay, that's for sure!

The story: a metorite crashes with a bacteria that animates a metal statue and raves the iron in human blood. This guy who is deep in debt while he fixes up an inn and his brother and the girl he loved as a teen and the shariff and some other people try to figure out how to stop it.

Was it good?

No. It wasn't the worst movie ever, but it's such a lame Transformers-lite that it's hard to enjoy any of it. The characters a lame -- you have two brothers fixing up an inn and deep in debt...which has nothing to do with anything. Then you have the guy in love with the girl who comes back into town after getting a divorce and their story which is boring with so much bad dialog that it is more painful for the audience than it is for the woman's daughter who has to listen to the two of them. Now of course no one is renting the movie for that, but it takes up a good chunk of the film (probably because filming people is a lot cheaper than the special effects to animate the iron golumn) and it's all basically worthless. Might as well just fast forward through all of it.

The one thing they add that is unique is that the space-iron-thng kills by infecting people's blood, except I'm not sure how that makes sense. It seems to want iron and is attracted to the iron in people's blood, but it doesn't eat the iron or use it...it just goes after the people and then infects them and they die.

Huh?

Anyway, ignoring that there are some decent shots of the iron golumn, but the action-y scenes just don't have anything special about them -- no sense of humor, no real tension -- and because none of the character clicked at all.

There are two basic ways to construct screenplays (and by no means do all movies have to conform to this, but it's what most will do). Either (A) you have a character whose inner goal is parallel to his outer goal (such as in DIE HARD where McClane wants to save his marriage, but then he has to save his wife from the terrorists) or they are in opposition to each other (as in MINORITY REPORT where the main guy wants the future cops program to work, but then he is accused of a crime and now he will have to prove it doesn't work to prove his innocence). This movie doesn't have anything like that. No real goals, no real character work...just random people with a lame and very forced love story.

They would have been better off cutting all of it and just filling in that time with something cool. Like jokes that didn't make it into the Hangover.

Still...for younger kids on a Saturday afternoon the movie is probably fine. It'll be slow, but harmless and they might like the iron golumn aspect. For adults it doesn't nearly have any of the spark or creativity it takes to make a low budget rip-off really work. (A sense of humor would have especially been a good idea.)

*** AVOID ***