Having been too old to play with the original Transformers toys when they came out in 1984, I had for the following 23 years also managed to avoid the comic books, the video games, the TV series and the 1986 animated film based around the concept of battling robots who can turn themselves into various machines, mostly the kind you drive. But with Michael Bay’s live-action extravaganza landing in American cinemas like the evil transformer Megatron stomping on an SUV, I found myself for a time transported, though not transformed, by Bay’s vision of Earth as a battleground for the powerful Decepticons and Autobots. (Guess who the evil ones are.)
Bay, director of big, loud, and emptyheaded blockbusters like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, has never made a movie you’d call deep, but has occasionally made entertaining ones, most notably 1996’s The Rock. So, for about the first 45 minutes I was entertained. It’s true that the story has barely progressed, but it hasn’t gotten dumb either, and the first sight you get of the airplane unfolding itself into a giant killer robot will probably have you about as much in awe as the frightened soldiers about to get their asses kicked. The screenplay takes the usual effects-movie approach of splitting its time between befuddled government types and a random male youth, played by Disturbia’s Shia LaBeouf (whose parents, I guess, dreamed of raising a female porn star). Not only does he happen to unwittingly own the key to victory for the Decepticons, but he (coincidentally?) buys a car that turns out to be even more special than Steven King’s Christine, which also boasted a self-tuning radio.
It’s the lengthy midsection where the movie spirals downward. The semi-dorky teenager gets outfitted with a hot (but also savvy) female sidekick, the USA threatens to go to war on false pretenses (the satire being, I think, unintentional), and then there’s where someone thought it was time for some lame comic relief. It’s probably when the robots start calling the boy by his ebay user name that it starts to seem silly. Certainly it’s before Anthony Anderson turns out to be a computer expert living with his mom who’s the key to saving the world. (Wow, this is exactly the role Kevin Smith plays in Live Free or Die Hard, and yet somehow it was more believable there.) But for sure things have soured by the time we hear the robot voices. They all sound like, well, robots, male-sounding robots, except for (shall I call it) the aspiring “urban” transformer, who sounds like he’s TiVo’d a lot of bad TV shows. Can studio executives just get together and declare a moratorium on robots and nerdy white people and anyone else, for that matter, screwing up and then saying “my bad” in any way that suggests that the line is humorous?
Not only isn’t the movie funny, but it’s so silly that it ends up undercutting the action in a way. What I think an audience really wants from a movie like this is a big Godzilla/Kong Kong-type scene where the big monster or robot or whatever goes apeshit and starts ripping things apart. Ideally, this ought to be thrilling but also put you into the scene enough so it’s a little scary as well. And it really doesn’t help if you have a ten-year-old boy in a car saying “cool!” about a second after the Decepticons have just barely managed not to get him slaughtered by a falling overpass. It’s the people who paid to watch who are supposed to be saying that. (On the bright side, or not, depending on your point of view, the movie’s body count is fairly low.)
Yes, we finally do get to see the (overlong) battle between good and evil in the big city with skyscrapers getting knocked about, after quite awhile without anything really interesting happening or the story developing much further. (Um, exactly why do the Decepticons want to kill everyone? Oh, right, they're evil.) But even though the effects are flawless in terms of realism, the live-action Transformers still winds up seeming as cartoonish as anything on Saturday-morning TV, only much less compact in its storytelling. I didn’t expect this movie to be a master class in screenwriting, but nor did I expect to be as bored as I was.
In short, this toy story could have used some tinkering.
IMDB link
written 7/12/07
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