RSSNot Another Transformers Review
Jul 05
Movies Movies, Transformer Comments Off
G.I. Joe the movie? Another He-Man and the Masters of the Universe remake? Because once those are reality all of my favorite childhood toys will have be re-envisioned for the 21st century. Transformers was just a harbinger of the destruction to come.
Along with comic book adaptations, cartoons to live-action films have always been the desiccation of some of my most intimate youthful imaginings. I lived in those worlds for chunks of time, and when I watch the films, I am rarely able to watch them without some serious, butt-kicking nostalgia. That said, I think it was inevitable that I left the theater after Transformers with mixed feelings.
The best part of Transformers is Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf. LaBeouf is extraordinary in this role. He perfectly captures this quirky, obsessed kid and convinces us that he would react just the way he did when he discovers that his car can transform into a robot and that it has a personality. For the first half of the movie, he takes us along for the ride and it’s a good one. We meet his crazy-ass parents, get two car chases -- one where he’s chasing his Camaro, and the other where the Camaro is chasing him -- and we get some wonderful, bumbling scenes with Megan Fox, who plays the hot chick Mikaela Banes.
But the movie quickly disintegrates by trying to pass off an improbable and inexplicable plot. I’m embarrassed to try and repeat it. The film is overloaded with unnecessary exposition and inane backstory, details that don’t make sense of the past and don’t help us make sense of the story in the present. Michael Bay holds our hands through every step, as if he’s afraid we won’t be able to accept the Transformers for what they are. We get it; they are alien and they can adapt into our vehicles in order to disguise themselves. It’s cool. It’s almost besides the point that they are chasing the Allspark (believe me, you won’t care and it doesn’t seem to matter by the end anyway.) The whole Sector 7 thread could easily have been missing from the story and it would have been at least as good a movie. Bay would have been better served to stick to what he does best: blow things up.
Bay damages his reputation as an action heavy in the first hour by spending most of the time on Sam and giving us a very richly developed hero to cheer for. Then the second hour plus is about the robots. My friend summed it up best after the film when he said, “It could have been about any robots. They just happened to be called Transformers.” And that is the fatal flaw in Michael Bay’s adaptation. This was an okay robot story, but it was a seriously bad Transformers movie. There was only scant introductions to the Autobots, none at all for the Decepticons. They had zero personality beyond good vs. bad, and Sam’s fealty for Bumblebee aside, the scripts presumes that humans would embrace the Autobots like buddies.
I think this plays off of the fact that we are supposed to embrace the Autobots like buddies. That’s why a prolonged scene at Sam’s house involving the Autobots in a game of hide and seek runs over 10 minutes. It’s the only time in the film that we get to know the Autobots as autonomous personalities. The rest is just Decepticon butt-kicking. And even there, the action happens so fast across the screen, you never get a very good sense of what’s going on. Optimus Prime is absent for most of the final battle until he zooms into the final scene for the sole purpose of taking on Megatron, a battle that is short-lived and anti-climatic. Maybe while the Transformers were surfing the internet to learn about Earth-culture, they could take in a little Matrix-style fighting. Now wouldn’t that have been something.
I have to brace myself for every cartoon to live action movie because inevitably it ends up flat. But it’s impossible to separate the ingrained knowledge of my youth when I watch the film. I want it to be exactly like I used to imagine it. At the same time, it’s always a little awe-inspiring to see those things on the big screen. Transformers doesn’t quite pull it off at either end.
