Movie titles can not be copyrighted . This is why The Asylum , the film company that has a monopoly on " mockbusters " can get away with bringing out film titles that are almost identical to Hollywood blockbusters . What is amazing is that they use ideas and designs that are so obviously based on other movies . It's well known that Harlan Ellison sued Jemes Cameron claiming that THE TERMINATOR ripped off a couple of episodes that Ellison scripted for THE OUTER LIMITS . Cameron and Hemdale Films settled out of court though if you've seen the episodes in question you might be shocked that anyone considered Cameron is supposed to have stolen anyone's idea . Indeed if the film resembles anything it's the 1972 DOCTOR WHO story Day Of The Daleks and Louis Marks didn't feel the need to go running to a lawyer ..
Knowing this you will find yourself asking why Cameron amongst others didn't feel the need to contact lawyers to make an undeserved fast buck ? Perhaps they did but thought better of it since they felt that'd be similar to beating up a man in a wheelchair ? It's not so much the TRANSMORPHERS that gives away the plot but :
TRANSMORPHERS 2 : FALL OF MAN
Has anyone noticed it seems rather similar to :
TERMINATOR 3 : RISE OF THE MACHINES
And this is what the film essentially is - a blatant reworking of TERMINATOR 3 with TRANSFORMERS , MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and HALOWEEN 3 SEASON OF THE WITCH thrown in to the predictable , unoriginal mix . We have a scene where a satellite dish turns in to a terminator and you are absolutely left in no doubt what so ever that it's a terminator . Same as later on a car turns in to a transformer and you can't help shouting " Transmorphers other films in disguise
Despite the amount of " intellectual property borrowing " going on it's the production values and storytelling that bring the film down . Everything has to be force fed to the audience as in
Character A : Wow , we're dealing with a technical complicated thingy
Character B : what's a technical complicated thingy ?
Character C : It's a thing that's technical and complicated
with the lines being spoken in the most uninterested dispassionate way possible . Boxleitner and Rubin are fairly well known and give the least worst performances in a cast who are attractive but laughably wooden . I looked up the ensemble cast genuinely expecting their resumes to have included what is euphemistically known as " adult films " but found very few of the cast have appeared in more than a handful of unknown movies . I doubt if any of the cast will go on to major roles
I'll be honest here and state that TRANSMORPHERS 2 is a very mediocre film but no more or less than that , though admittedly the good concepts are culled from other superior movies . The SyFy channel in Britain is showing a week of mockbuster films and it's by no means the worst one I've seen . Sadly something tells me SyFy will be broadcasting films much worse
