Transformers

So last night, giving in to our inner 12-year-olds, Rick and I went out to see Transformers, Michael Bay‘s latest assault on good moviemaking, good taste, and childhood memories.

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

In other words, it was exactly what I was afraid it might end up being: a bizarre combination of seeing the coolest toys from my childhood on screen as if they’d been ripped right out of my prepubescent imagination, and Michael Bay’s crack-addict-on-a-caffeine-IV approach to moviemaking. The man is such a hack, but he’s just so good at it that you end up walking out hating yourself for actually enjoying the dreck that he puts on screen.

More thoughts (some quite possibly spoileriffic) after the jump….

First off, there are good things about the film — and with any Michael Bay film, they’re primarily centered around the special effects. Plot, characterization, logic…these things are unimportant, as long as he can come up with something that looks cool, is really loud, and explodes. And, admittedly, he does a good job at that. It’s simply that for every good point, there’s at least one bad point, and the final result is a big ol’ muddled mess.

For instance, the robots and their transformation sequences. Incredibly well realized, and a lot more believable than you might expect at first. I was having fun with some of the scenes identifying various bits and pieces of car and where they ended up on the robots, trying to piece together a vague idea of how the transformation worked. However, given that the transformation ability is one of the major key points to the movie — that’s what gives the toys, the TV show, and the movies their name — you’d think that Bay would at least let you get a good look at the process so you could see what is going on. Nope, no such luck — with only a few exceptions, nearly every shot of any of the robots is done in Bay’s hyperkinetic, extreme close-up shooting style, so the transformation is more of a vague impressionistic blur of motion and color than anything you can actually understand.

The battle and action sequences are done the same way, also — I kept wanting to scream at the screen and tell Bay to back up about 50 yards or so. I assume he’s trying for a very “you are there” style, but by constantly putting his camera all of ten feet away from any action, you can’t really see anything. You end up figuring out what’s going on by the surrounding establishing shots — sort of like figuring out an unfamiliar word by the context of what’s around it. You don’t really know if you understand, but you’re pretty sure you’ve at least got a good vague idea of what it should be.

At the same time, even with those complaints, the scenes with the robots really do hold the movie together. The human actors, while more or less competent (though I’m not entirely convinced that Megan Fox, as Mikaela, is anything other than an excuse for Bay to spend entirely too long letting his camera trace over her curves almost as lovingly as it does over the cars), had so little to work with that I kept finding myself wishing that they’d shut up and Bay would get back to doing what he does best — blowing shit up. The one exception to this, for me, was Julie White as Judy Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf‘s Sam Witwicky’s mother) — whether she was given the only good lines in the script or if she just improvised her way through being a goofy, clueless mother, she ended up my favorite. The creepy-weird Sector Seven guy (“She’s a criminal. Criminals are hot!”) is a close second, though.

There are plenty of other things that bugged me, of course. A short list:

1. Megatron semi-consciously engraving the coordinates of the Allspark on Cpt. Witwicky’s eyeglasses — was that really the best the scriptwriters could come up with? It made no sense at all!

2. Scale seemed pretty variable at times. When Bumblebee collapses the Allspark to something palm sized (palm sized for a giant robot, that is), it doesn’t seem like it’d be anywhere near small enough for Sam to carry like a football. Also, when Optimus Prime picks up the eyeglasses…uh, yeah, with how big Prime’s hands have to be, those eyeglasses would have to be about two and a half feet across. Just how big was Cpt. Witwicky’s head, anyway?

3. What happened to the ‘new’ transformers created during the battle scene? I think there were three: the pickup driven by the two bimbos, the desktop computer carried by the geek, and the Mt. Dew soda machine. We see them come alive, join the fight…and then that’s it.

   • Also, does the Allspark only create Decepticons? The Nokia phone had some serious attitude, and all three robots created during the final battle seemed to be pretty pissy. In my head, the Mt. Dew machine had dialogue somewhere along the lines of, “these jerks keep smacking me, kicking me, cramming their hands up me to get their stupid soda pop…it’s payback time!” as it goes marching into the streets. Why doesn’t the Allspark ever create any Autobots?
4. Related to the Nokia phone that was turned into a mini-Decepticon: when it was about ready to break out of the box, they hit it with a blast of something that killed it. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least mention this mysterious something during the subsequent battles? Even if they didn’t want to use it as a miracle cure, two lines of dialog (“What about blasting ’em with the radiation that killed the Nokia-bot?” “Sorry, kid, we can’t generate that much power.”) would have at least explained why it worked there but was never brought up again.

5. Reportedly, Bay didn’t want to use Arcee/Ariel because there wasn’t time to explain the presence of feminine robots (again, two lines of dialog: “There are girl robots?” “Every other race has sexes, why can’t we?” Then have something explode, and the movie keeps going.), but one of the Autobots (honestly, I forget which one) has a very obvious American Black Hero accent and mannerisms. No sexes, but apparently there are races? Okay, perhaps I’m stretching with this one, but…it was enough to bug me.

   • Oh, and could the token black characters be any more stereotypical? Yikes!

And yet, with all that…Rick and I both had a blast. It was big, dumb, and a whole lot of fun. I can’t recommend an evening full-price showing, but as long as you keep in mind that it’s the epitome of all Michael Bay excesses, it might very well be worth a matinee — but it might not. “More than meets the eye” may describe the Transformers…but it certainly doesn’t describe the movie.