Overall Rating
 Awesome: 33.43%
Worth A Look: 12.75%
Just Average: 11.61%
Pretty Crappy: 11.33%
Sucks: 30.88%
12 reviews, 281 user ratings
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| Transformers |
by Dawn Taylor
"It's a Michael Bay movie. About giant robots."
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Here’s the thing. This is a Michael Bay movie about giant robots smashing stuff. So, yes, it may seem petty and overly film critic-ish to want it to be, you know, good. But that’s really what film critics do, isn’t it? We critique films. Even when they’re Michael Bay films about giant robots. So let the critiquing begin.After seeing Transformers, my heterosexual life partner made an interesting observation, which I’ll paraphrase. Michael Bay is the directorial equivalent of a sociopath. See, a sociopath knows that people express certain emotions and say certain things in specific situations, so he becomes very good at faking it so that nobody realizes that he’s a sociopath. He doesn’t actually feel or understand those emotions that he’s mimicking, but sociopaths are good enough actors that they get away with it.
Similarly, Bay knows that certain things are supposed to happen at certain times in movies, so he puts those things there because he knows people expect them. “This is where the wisecracking sidekick shows up – give him something funny to say,” Bay will demand. “I’ll have Jon Voight exiting the helicopter in slow motion, because people really like that slow-motion thing,” he’ll say.
It’s been ten minutes since an explosion? Better blow something up! Nothing funny’s happened for awhile? Toss Bernie Mac in as a used-car salesman! Not enough sex in the robot movie? Dress the teenage love-interest like a hooker and have the camera linger on her overly tan torso!
Michael Bay is so adept at faking being a filmmaker, in fact, that people actually think he knows what he’s doing even though his movies are soulless, charmless, big-budget monstrosities made by a man with all the creative aesthetic of a nine-year-old blowing up plastic Army guys in his back yard.
Which brings us to Transformers, a movie deliberately engineered to play to young bohunks who read FHM magazine and watch the Speed channel on cable. The opening is vintage, cold-blooded Michael Bay, with a droning explanation of how before time began there was something called The Cube blahblahblahblahblah, followed by a bunch of soldiers in the Middle East talking about their mama’s cooking and how their hunky, square-jawed captain (Josh Duhamel) just wants to hold his baby for the first time. Bay has seen a lot of movies about soldiers, you see, so he knows all about how they talk.
Then stuff starts blowing up and Bay gets to have his army guys fire off big, loud weapons while insistent music tells us how exciting it all is. Stateside, there’s a kid, played by Shia LeBoeuf, who gets a beater Camaro that turns out to be a giant robot that can only communicate with him by playing really, really annoying pop songs with obvious lyrics. Which proves that Bay has also seen Christine.
The Camaro’s a Good Guy Robot from Space. There are also Bad Guy Robots who want this Cube because it's a source of energy that can turn everyone's toaster ovens and iPods into killer robots. Or something. Anyway, whatever it does, the Good Guy Robots need to find it first.
The highlights of the film include a boombox on Air Force One that turns into an assassin-bot (because with all the security on Air Force One, nobody’d think twice about a boombox that shows up out of nowhere) and plugs itself into something on the plane that allows it to hack into, apparently, every computer everywhere. Michael Bay hasn’t the slightest idea of how computers operate, nor does he care. And he doesn’t care that we care, either. Because he’s a sociopath.
The hacking thing leads to some decoding by a beautiful (of course) Australian cryptographer (Rachel Taylor) who gets to utter the deathless line, “There’s only one hacker in the world who can crack this code!” She’s talking about the Funny Third Banana Character that Bay requires at this point in the film, who’s played by Anthony Anderson and who does absolutely nothing at all, but the Michael Bay Clichéd Character Generator demanded that one appear at this point in the script, so there he is.
Elsewhere, Captain Hunky McSquarejaw fights a giant robotic scorpion in the desert. Oh, and Shia’s explorer grandpa was the one who found Megatron in the ice at the North Pole or something, so the Good Guy Robots, led by Optimus Prime, seek him out because Shia was selling grand-dad’s stuff on eBay. And as awful as this movie is, I’ll admit that hearing a giant robot ask, “Are you username Ladiesman217? Where is the eBay item?” is pretty damn funny. As is the decal on the side of the Bad Guy Robot Disguised as a Police Car that says “to punish and enslave.” Which only proves that even though Bay is a sociopath and a hack, at some point in the process there was one clever writer on board for about ten minutes.
Many questions arise while watching Transformers. How can cars rearrange their parts so that they’re 20 times larger as robots? How can so many people die from massive collateral damage during the Ultimate Giant Robot Battle, yet we never hear any screams of agony or see any blood? What would the Good Guy Space Robots have turned into if they hadn’t all crashed to Earth right next to car dealerships? And isn’t Decepticon a really stupidly obvious name for Bad Guy Robots? Why not just call them Betraybots or Eviloids?
Also, at two-and-a-half freakin’ hours in length, shouldn’t there have been considerably more Bad Bots vs. Good Bots? Throughout the bulk of the film, we see the robots destroy Shia’s family’s back yard (in a scene that goes on and on and on at painful length), and run away from helicopters, and turn into cars and drive around. Considering that the whole movie is being sold as nothing more than a CGI version of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, one kind of expects there to be more rockin’ and sockin’ and less funny business with Optimus Prime destroying Mom’s flower bed.There are people who believe that it’s okay for summer movies to be stupid, as long as they’re big and loud and throw a lot of special effects on the screen. These people are either desperate to get into a theater to partake of air conditioning, or they’re idiots. Either way, Michael Bay has created a movie just for them, and it’s going to make 700 gazillion dollars.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=15538&reviewer=413
originally posted: 07/03/07 15:42:08
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
03-Jul-2007 (PG-13)
DVD: 16-Oct-2007
UK
27-Jul-2007 (12A)
Australia
28-Jun-2007 (M)
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