Transformers Movie Review
By Jason Revill
Being a twenty-something that grew up playing with Transformers, it’s not like I had a choice when it came to the movie. I was going to see it. Even though I never have been a fan of Michael Bay’s work, I thought he would be a good candidate to make a high octane film about giant robots embroiled in a galaxy spanning civil war. I watched the previews and saw the three hour commercial also known as the MTV Movie Awards, where Bay received an award for “Best Movie You Haven’t Seen Yet”. I was genuinely looking forward to seeing it. Unfortunately, after about an hour into the film it was all I could do to keep from walking out. Transformers is one of the worst films I’ve seen in the theater.
Without knowing it humans have gotten themselves stuck in the middle of a centuries old war between to races of robots, the noble Autobots and the evil Decepticons. After searching government files and apparently EBay (sigh) the Decepticon come searching for Sam Witwicky (Shia Lebouf). It seems that his grandfather was a famous explorer who discovered the Decepticon leader Megatron frozen in ice. Grandpa Flitwicky accidentally activated Megatron by touching him when they originally met. The evil Megatron then etched directions to the mythical Allspark on Flitwicky’s glasses. Now both the Autobots and Decepticons are trying to get their hands on them in order to find the life creating Allspark. I’m not really sure why since both Megatron and the Allspark have been for some reason moved to Hoover Dam, so whatever information that was on the glasses would be useless. Not to mention, Agent Simmons (John Turturro) just leads them there anyway, thus making the whole thing pointless as well as ridiculous.
Shia LeBouf is seriously one of the best young actors today and it is unfortunate that he was forced to carry the weight of this film. It’s not that he can’t lead a movie; he proved that he can in Disturbia. No, the problem is he can only do so much. How can he possibly save a scene where he’s trying to keep his parents from noticing five twenty foot high robots literally shushing each other and tip toeing around their back yard? Meanwhile, Megan Fox does absolutely nothing. I imagine the response she received to inquiries about her character’s motivation were answered with “Stand there, look pretty.” John Voight is so ridiculous as the Secretary of Defense that after about his fifth line everything coming out of his mouth was clichéd to the point of hilarity. Consequently, it caused me to question whether or not I was wrong about him EVER being a good actor. For every Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home there’s a National Treasure and Anaconda. By the way, when did Voight start looking like someone shaved a chipmunk?
You can say whatever you want about the acting in this film, but the one thing that will forever stand out for me about Transformers is that it is the one and only time I’ve hated John Turturro. It’s like he just gave up halfway through. Michael Bay likes to throw in one sort of hip, weird actor like Turturro or Steve Buscemi, but this time it doesn’t even remotely come off.
It would be unfair if I didn’t at least say this: the robots themselves are designed well. The thing I was most worried about was that they would go too far and try and Fast and the Furious everything, but I was pleased to see how they turned out. Where they failed, however, is that there is little to no difference between individual Transformer's personalities. After each Transformer is introduced for the first time delivers one line summing up the one dimensional depth to their character, that’s pretty much it. Each one is reduced to silly jokes (Bumblebee pees on someone) and cannon fodder. The Autobots themselves consistently get their asses handed to them by humans and Decepticons alike. Outside of apparently shooting them in the crotch, it’s impossible to kill a Decepticon. The Autobots never actually win a fight with anyone, it’s either the humans or the Decepticons that do. This may have something to do with the fact that the Autobots walk in and out of scenes arbitrarily. At one point they may be there to help and in the next minute they’re nowhere to be found.
There’s no good way to explain what’s bad about this film, without just telling you what happens from beginning to end. It’s as though whenever the filmmakers came to a decision, they completely made the wrong choice every time. I was a little worried when in the first ten minutes, we already had an Optimus Prime voice over and had seen our first Decepticon. At that point they’d already blown their load. There’s no place to go from there. Not long after that, we were introduced to the Jar-Jar Binks of the Transformer world in the form of Frenzy, a little Decepticon that changes into a boom box. This metallic Jawa spends the whole movie beeping and chirping while doing a lot of robot mugging to the camera.
It isn’t so much that there is no plot it’s just that no one even tried. The Allspark that everyone is trying to keep from Megatron is supposed to create life, except that it apparently only creates Decepticons. If that’s the case why bother keeping it around? I’m still not sure why it did what it did at the end of the movie, other than the fact that it completely resolved everything very neatly, although there is a question of a couple Decepticons that simply disappear. Also is it really a good idea to keep both the Allspark and Megatron locked up inside of Hoover Dam? Did that not seem like a bad idea to anyone?
There really isn’t any point to having the Josh Duhamel and Tyrese storyline at all. First off, the soldiers are clichés to the point of just being obnoxious. Duhamel just wants to go home to see his baby, another just wanted to eat his momma’s cooking, you also had the guy in nerdy glasses and Tyrese was, well, black. They never get any real attention and even once they do meet up with everyone else in the movie, they still seem like they’re in another film. I get the feeling that everything was kept separate so that if Bay felt the film was too long, he could cut them out and lose nothing of the main story.
Normally, I’m not the guy who rails against this sort of thing, but this film just reeked of being written by old white people. Some of the language just seemed like it was coming from your parents trying to be cool. The few minority characters in the film are not only disposable, but I’ll put it this way, you could tell who the Latino soldier was because even though he obviously speaks fluent English he refused to use it. It would be one thing if it was here or there, but that’s his “thing”. He casually uses Spanish and his fellow soldiers don’t understand him. That sums him up, his language. I feel bad for Tyrese, because he literally has nothing to do other than looking at stuff and saying things like “Oh man it’s doing something!”
These things probably would go completely unnoticed if it weren’t for the fact that the Autobot Jazz is essentially a robot minstrel show. He tries to use a bunch of Hip Hop references like name dropping 50 Cent that are reminiscent of Karl Rove rapping. Worst of all when he first enters the film he looks at Sam and Mikaela and says “What up my little bitches?” It’s obvious the moment you hear it that the line is only in there because they couldn’t get away with “What up Niggas?” It makes me wonder if that dust up with Imus a couple months back made them go back and re-dub the line.
The one thing that this mess is able to accomplish is selling a crap load of merchandise. It would be one thing if this was just a bad movie, but it’s a two and a half hour long commercial. I’ve never seen a movie whore itself to so many companies. Bay covered everything from General Motors whole line (stealing music from Kill Bill to introduce the all new Camaro), to Panasonic, to Mountain Dew, to Xbox, to Burger King. It’s not like people just use these things in the film either. Bay designed shots and lighting to accentuate the product, such as close ups of company logos, discussing the products themselves and keeping the focus deep to see the giant burger king sign that is for some reason in the middle of the screen behind the main characters. It’s not like they were strolling along and oops there’s a Burger King logo filling the frame.
Now, this would normally be the point in the review where I would say that even though it’s not that great the action was awesome. I’m sorry that’s not the case. For the most part the action is shot in sort of a close up frenetic hand held sort of a way so that you can’t really tell what’s going on. Occasionally, there would be some Matrix style slow motion, but if you’ve seen the previews or a commercial you’ve seen all the best FX shots in the film. I’ll put it this way: I went to see Transformers with a friend and he dozed off during the big climactic action seen. I never thought I’d actually live to see someone sleeping during a Michael Bay film.
What you don’t get to see from the trailers is that this film has a lot more cornball humor and less action than you were led to believe. The only thing you haven’t seen is the stuff you won’t like. I feel like a sucker, because I should have seen this coming. I knew Michael Bay was the director and I knew there was supposed to be a lot of action, but instead of questioning what I was seeing I chose to be optimistic and I got burned for it. It’s like when someone says, “Hey, smell this. It smells like sh*t” and you’re surprised when it actually does smell like sh*t. The only difference is that Transformers doesn’t just smell like sh*t, it looks and sounds like it as well.
The Grade
- Story: F
- Acting: D
- Visuals: C+
- Originality: D
- Enjoyability: F
- Overall: F
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