transformers
I’m not going to lie to you people. I was never a huge Transformers fan. Transformers, like He-Man, G. I. Joe, and later Pokemon, was a transparent marketing engine created by Hasbro to sell Japanese-made robot toys. The show never grabbed me the way that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did, but if your childhood passed even briefly through the mid-1980s, you watched (and probably liked) at least a little Transformers. So, really, as an impressionable youth of the 80s, how could I not see this movie on opening night in a giant theater with a friend who describes the fruitless battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons in language that borders on romance?
Slate‘s review makes absolutely no sense to me. Dana Stevens mostly complains about Transformers‘s convoluted plot, but the plot couldn’t possibly be more straightforward. The Autobots and Decepticons are locked in an ancient struggle to reclaim their destroyed homeworld of Cybertron. The key to doing so the Allspark, a source of limitless energy that likely generated the robot race to begin with. The Allspark is somewhere on Earth. Plot, roll out! Where Stevens should be seeing good versus evil, she inexplicably sees—and you can read the article if you don’t believe me—Democrats and Republicans. Way to perpetuate Slate‘s “screaming liberal” reputation, girl.
From a cinematic standpoint, the movie plays out exactly the way I thought it would. My mental dialogue is as follows:
“Transformers!!!!!”
“Michael Bay…”
“Optimus Prime!!!!”
“But…Michael Bay.”
Yes, Michael Bay, the style over substance genius who brought us Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and The Island, also directs Transformers. He gets top billing in the opening credits, followed immediately by Hasbro. Given all of that, the movie is actually pretty good. I mean, what do you want from me? It’s Transformers. I’m not going to hold this thing to the same standards as certain other movies. The quality of the movie is essentially a war between the inherent coolness of the Transformers (and their truly excellent special effects) and Michael Bay’s traitorous attempts to make the film marketable to a wider audience.
The movie clocks in at two and a half hours, and the sad truth is that you could’ve excised the first hour, since it only gets good once Optimus Prime unfolds himself and starts talking. The movie is filled with the unbearable fingerprints of Michael Bay up until that point. You’ve got unidimensional jock caricatures, unidimensional soldiers, unidimensional Pentagon officials, and in a small snatch of language that perfectly captures Bay’s attitude toward the little plausible science in the movie, the U.S. defense network gets taken offline by what is described as “a spiderbug virus.” Spiderbug. A thing that is both a spider and a bug, which are, as I’m sure you realize, the same God damned thing.
Also, is Michael Bay a venomous racist or something? I submit the following. Jazz, the obviously black Autobot, gets killed. The black computer hacker genius is played purely for laughs and contributes essentially nothing to the story. The one Latino soldier in the movie gets yelled at for speaking Spanish, not once, not twice, but three times. Make of it what you will.
Bay throws everything he can into the movie. Romantic subplot? Check. Disproportionately attractive female characters? Check. Shot of—and I swear to you that I expected to see it the minute his character was introduced—triumphant soldier hoisting his infant son into the air against a brilliant sunset at movie’s end? Check. What Bay doesn’t understand is that we’re all here for the robots. Shia Lebeouf plays human protagonist Sam Witwicky with just the right amount of awed silliness, but it hardly matters. All we really want is to see Optimus Prime and Megatron destroy each other.
The movie is best in the moments where it is most like the original cartoon. Megatron bursts from his prison, transforms into a fighter jet, soars vertically into the air, transforms back into himself, and slams into the ground, booming, “You fail me yet again, Starscream!” Perfect. More of this, please. Less of the unnecessary secondary characters. Give me more robots destroying each other. It looks good and it feels great. Transformers gets better as it rolls along, and if you can muscle your way past that first inconsequential hour and hang on for the massive robot battles, you’ll have a good time.
One of the things I recall about my best friend from kindergarden is that he really really liked the Transformers. I never watched it because my mother never let me watch any of those Saturday morning cartoons. In fact, I recall my third birthday party going down as such: I was annoyed that there were all these people in the house eating my Fruit Loops, and most of the gifts I got were things like little basketballs and cartoon action figures. My mother says that when I took the wrapping off a Skeletor action figure, I had a look on my face that said, “What the hell is this thing?”
Michael Bay’s daughter was in my sister’s Brownie troop. My mother says he’s a total ass. Unless that was Michael Mann.
Then again, the white soldier that criticizes the latino soldier the third time immediately gets killed. As for the black computer hacker, that is the type of wonderful comedic relief that the actor playing him (Anthony Anderson) has been doing for years. And Tyrese Gibson’s Special Forces character, who I expected to die immediately, gets through the movie just fine. At first I did think of Jazz’s death as “the only black transformer got killed”, but you figure one of the Autobots had to die in the plot, and it was a better twist than what I assumed was going to happen (either the glorious, pious, Optimus Prime self-sacrifice with a gigantic explosion, or the heart-tugging death of precious, yellow Bumblebee). Besides, in the traditional storyline, ALOT of them end up dead at some point, including that dork Optimus Prime.
I’m personally keeping my fingers crossed for a special features DVD where they pretty much cut out any organic life from the film and just extend the city battle sequences to 3 hours. I want more hot robot-on-robot action! More ninja rolls! More Optimus Prime slugging sucker-bots in the face!