Against my better judgement I went to go see the Transformers movie last night. I went in with very low expectations, since I've hated everything that the director, Michael Bay, has ever laid his hands on. Needless to say, Bay has once again managed to let me down, and when you go into a film expecting to see shit, that is a hard thing to do.
I went in with low expectations because Bay's previous work makes me question the value of the concept of freedom of speech. Whenever I value my own ability to say what I please about the U.S. government, I have to weigh it against the fact that the film Armageddon came out in theaters in 1998.
What boggles me is that Bay is the sort of director who you'd picture making terrible B movies in the 1970s, the kind of films that were honored by the recent double feature Grindhouse, and actually, even films like Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! seem like Shakespeare in my mind compared to the cinematic tumors that Bay releases, and yet here he is: A highly paid, highly successful director who keeps seeming to prove to me that the human race is doomed to extinction. Sadly, as the mayhem of the apocalypse is unleashed upon us, I imagine that many people will liken it to a Michael Bay film.
But back to Transformers. The real problem with this film is one of story focus. I don't know if you, the reader, has ever seen any incarnation of the Transformers television series (I've only seen the original 1984 series myself,) but trust me, the stars of the television show were the title characters: Robots fighting a civil war for the control of their home planet who had brought the battle to earth and used their advanced technology to hide themselves amongst us by, yes, you guessed it, transforming, into vehicles found on earth. On one side are the normally peaceful Autobots, robots who were built for labor purposes and who, as their name might suggest, transform into cars. Against them are the military robts, the Decepticons, who transform into fighter planes, tanks, and even handheld guns in the cartoon show.
In the Michael Bay movie, these fanciful robots take a back seat to mere humans, and unfortunately for us they are they kind of humans that inhabit Bay's movies. They are all mere sketches of human behavior, and it was particularly weird to see that an interstellar war between giant robots was consistently pushed aside in favor of a series of American Pie-esque scenes in which we meet the films protagonist: Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky, who is the descendant of the first earthling to discover the existence of the transformers. Sam, as a character, is little more than an erect penis running around on two legs, chasing after an often sweaty bad girl (who seems to be nothing more than a traditional racing girl with a troubled past) played with massive ineptitude by Megan Fox.
Anything that was in the movie to give Sam depth seemed cribbed from another source. His relationship with Megan Fox, and his desire to buy a cool car to impress her reminded me of Spiderman, while his cast-wearing dog harkens back to the "dog in a cast" genre of comedy that's been around since "There's Something About Mary."
It is Sam who must go on the traditional hero's journey in this film, and ultimately it is he who saves humanity from an invasion of Vending Machines firing explosive Mountain Dew rounds at innocent bystanders. Yes, an evil vending machine makes an appearance in this film. Along with a rampaging X-Box and Nokia cellphone. Was it not written in the book of revelations, "Yea, you will see a film with thinly veiled product placement, and a woman working on Air Force One will be shown biting into a Ding Dong after it fell on the floor."
The film seems relentless in its efforts to introduce more and more humans into the plot, who we are forced to keep jumping back to so that we don't forget they were in the movie. The film begins with a group of soldiers under attack in the middle east, including one with a wife and new born baby back home. Then there's Jon Voigt as the secretary of state, and a subplot involving a number of experts in the field of signal detection and decoding. Then there's Anthony Anderson as the hacker who is brought in to decode the language of the Transformers. Add in John Turturro and his secret government agency, and you have a total of five plot lines involving humans going on at any one time, each one as insipid as the last.
Look, I'm not saying that I can't enjoy a stupid film, or even a bad film. If you throw 1982's The Beastmaster into a dvd player there's a good chance I'll sit there and watch it, laughing at its wonderful badness. But Bay doesn't seem to realize that all anyone who came to see the Transformers wants to see is robots fighting each other. Time and again he cuts away to focus on the human side, not realizing that his most human characters are the computer generated images battling each other for the control of the film's MacGuffin, an artifact called "the cube." The film runs on for almost two hours before the Decepticons even mobilize, leaving us watching endless scenes which desperately try to get us to care about the human characters.
As for the Transformers themselves? Well, its a mixed bag. Most of the transformers look like a jumble of metal that makes it hard to tell what you are looking at, and makes it particularly hard to follow any of the action sequences, never a good thing in an action film. Megatron, the Decepticon leader looked literally like a collection of shrapnel which vaguely resembled a human figure, but was such a multi-layed mess that I often had no idea what I was seeing. He also had visible fang like teeth, which I guess he needed to chew whatever kind of food robots eat.
That having been said, anyone who grew up watching the television show will probably love the Autobot's leader, Optimus Prime, especially since he was voiced by the same actor who originally portrayed him. Prime gets all of the film's best dialouge (which isn't saying much), and has the most heart of any character on screen. If there was one slightly redeeming thing about the film it was the scene in which Optimus Prime refused to use lethal force against humanity, even to rescue one of his own. But unfortunately, scenes like this were few and far between in Bay's film. And Hugo Weaving was totally wasted as the voice of Megatron, since most of his dialouge sounded as though it had been put through so many filters as to make his performance wasted.
If you entertain any idea about watching Transformers, do yourself a favor: Go out and find a copy of the animated Transformers movie which came out in 1986. Despite being intended for children, it has better dialouge, more exciting action sequences, and though its plot is basically a thinly veiled amalgam of the Star Wars franchise, it still beats the shit out of Michael Bay's Transformers.
And Michael Bay? Please, as a service to the future of humanity, stop making films.
