Transformers
Michael Bay, USA, 2007
Rating: 3.3

Let’s face it: Transformers is stupid. Always has been. Even during its heyday in the ‘80s, it was a hokey piece of pop-cultural flotsam designed to sell toys. The mythology, if you want to call it that, was/is bush league and amateurish. Sentient robots is one thing – call me a dork if you like, but I kind of like that idea. Sentient robots from a planet called Cybertron, who for some reason gather together under the banner of “Autobots” or “Decepticons” – sorry, but your average episode of Teletubbies is better thought-out than that.

That said, action-movie director Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon, Bay Boys, Pearl Harbor) comes about as close as anyone could to pumping some modicum of entertainment value into the live-action Transformers movie. It’s conceivable that executive producer Steven Spielberg, had he decided to direct, could have injected the property with some of the mythic whimsy he did so well back in his fantasy period. But selling a movie about talking robots that turn into cars, trucks and boom boxes, and take on very Earth-ian names like Bumblee and Starscream, seems beyond even Spielberg’s abilities.

So Michael Bay does pretty much the only thing you can viably do to this moldy franchise: He injects it with heavy-metal hardware and surging testosterone. Transformers works best – to the extent that it can be said to work – when the steroidal score is jabbing at all our right receptors, pumping up expertly staged scenes of military conflict, technological gobbledygook, pitched battles with superheated, hardware and high-speed action. Bay’s Transformers wisely spends a good deal of its focus on the U.S. military’s reaction to some quick and dirty strikes by furtive Decepticon agents, with occasional glimpses of a female tech expert (Rachael Taylor) who enlists the aid of a hacker buddy (Anthony Anderson) to decipher the signal these stealthy attackers are using to hack the nation’s database.

Having said that, this multigajillion-dollar extravangza’s MVP is emerging star Shia LaBeouf, who gives this whole moneymaking exercise what heart and soul it possesses. As car-obsessed hormonal high-schooler Sam Witwicky, LaBeouf exerts a winning mix of self-effacing charm and Everyman likeability. It’s a testament to LaBeouf’s skill that we’re invested in his hopeless crush on and painfully contrived romance with classmate Mikeala (the aptly named Megan Fox), a sleek, midriff-baring hottie so far out of his league he should get nosebleeds simply looking at her.

When Sam’s new used Camaro turns out to be an Autobot named Bumblebee (Bay missed a prime opportunity to pump the Dead Milkmens’ “Bitchin Camaro” over the soundtrack), the two teenagers get sucked into a whirlwind adventure involving a McGuffin called the Cube or the “All Spark”—not to mention some Air Force soldiers, a super-secret government agency called Section 7 (embodied by a wickedly oily and self-satisfied John Turturro) and even the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight, who gets to fire off a few rounds before all’s said and done). And with twenty minutes to a good half-hour of judicious trimming, Transformers would be perfectly a perfectly feasible summer blockbuster – if it just stayed right there.

But Bay and his cohorts can’t roll all the way into Baghdad and finish the job (to use a somewhat strained Desert Storm metaphor) – they have to leave well enough alone and have these giant walking death machines talk – to the humans and to each other. It’s in these moments, when Optimus Prime prattles on about honor and sacrifice, and the noble Autobots pepper their expository conversations with their clunky names, that the superheated infrastructure of this adrenaline-charged popcorn entertainment collapses into the corny piffle of a badly animated ‘80s cartoon.

As long as you’re introducing some much-needed realism into this creaky pop-culture curiosity, go all the way and leave the stilted kidvid dialogue on the cutting-room floor. Leave these shape-shifting behemoths as larger-than-life enigmas, a couple of scales beyond our comprehension, waging an interstellar war on our home turf. Once you turn them into obedient puppy dogs sworn to save the Earth instead of opposing their enemies for some grander purpose (like, say, the Decepticons using our technology to reinvigorate themselves in order to launch an all-out strike on the entire galaxy), you’ve sacrificed any claim you may have staked to being anything other than a mega-expensive, special effects-heavy means to sell breakfast cereal.

It’s flashy, (mostly) fast and often engaging, but Transformers ultimately yokes itself to its source material so thoroughly that it’s not even as benignly forgettable as, say, Bad Boys II. It’s an impressive technical feat, to be sure, but beneath its chrome exterior is an engine of soggy cardboard, no more emotionally resonant, socially relevant or intellectually valid than Masters of the Universe.
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.