I recently broke down and bought a Bluray DVD player. It was mostly because of a store credit and a lack of imagination. I had swore that I would not get involved in this Betamax part duex duel between HDDVD and Bluray until an obvious victor had emerged so now I am suffering the trepidation of the outcome of this even though it still seems out of sight.

I know that Ratatouille is set to be Bluray so I was feeling pretty good that Pixar and Uncle Walt’s crew sees this as the way to go but I am sad to see a large number of my favorites go HDDVD only. But I suppose upconverting will do for me, it’s not as though I would really buy the bulk of my collection over, happily accept some titles as gifts but no repurchasing for me.

So there I am today at the store contemplating the purchase of Transformers and once again lamenting the format wars as it has been released on HDDVD, my only viable option was to purchase the standard DVD, I opted for the special two disc edition that includes the 19 minute Transformers The Beginning. A prequel that I thought would be interesting to see.

Well it is just awful, it’s an animatic, a 19 min After Effects rendering of a comic book. Overly muscular illustrations slowly slid across the screen as the narrative unfolds. Just terrible. What a waste of plastic. The story isn’t bad, though it’s badly acted in voice over. It would have been interesting to have seen this flushed out even if it was just a cartoon. But this horrendous slipping and sliding of storyboards is just…, it just sucks.

Save your money.