Michael Bay, You May Have Won the Battle, but the War is FAR From Over!!!

When I first heard Transformers was going to be made into a live-action movie, I scoffed at the idea. When I further heard that this live-action Transformers was going to be directed by Michael Bay , I threw up in my mouth a little bit. For my money, Bay has made one genuinely entertaining film and that’s The Rock. (Actually, watching The Island on DVD wasn’t a total waste of time).

Further adding to my apprehension about the movie were the pre-production designs for the Transformers. They looked absolutely nothing like what I would have imagined. Granted, the original models would have been too blocky and simplistic to attempt to animate them as photo-realistic objects, but I figured there had to be a better compromise than this:


The Decepticons were far too busy looking with sleek metal protrusions everywhere. They looked like something out of a bad mech anime. The Autobots were a little more palatable, but they still didn’t ‘wow’ me. It looked like the movie would be a guaranteed disaster before the first frame was even shot.

Yet, lo and behold--the finished product does not suck.

Shia LaBeouf (who reminds me of a young John Cusack, both physically and character-wise) does well as the dorky kid stuck in the middle of all the crazy robot warfare. He's a likeable actor (he made Disturbia almost decent) and I think he sells the relationship between himself and Bumblebee fairly well. In fact, Bay should have trusted that material more because I think it was the strongest part of the film.

There is no build-up in this movie. I swear Transformers start showing up like 10 minutes into the thing which is a different approach compared to famous monster movies directed by the film's executive producer, Spielberg. It's like Bay said, "Hey we spent a sh!tload on all these effects! Let's blow some $#!t up!"

(On a related note, ILM might have snatched the crown back from WETA after this film. To these eyes, WETA has held the title since LOTR: The Two Towers back in ’02. They had SFX in those last two films that literally made my jaw drop, not to mention their work on King Kong.)

The action kicks in early and the movie pretty much stays in one of two modes: funny or exhilarating (sometimes a combination of both). The plot is fairly disposable, recycling bits of ID4 and Terminator 2 along the way. The Transformers themselves with the exception of Bumblebee aren't really allowed to be characters so much as 'action-conduits'. Usually this would annoy me, but when the action is done well I don't care. It's like watching a martial arts movie. Do you really care why Jade Dragon is trying to find the Mystic Blade of Zhi Chu? No! You just want the damned thing found so you can watch her kick more @$$!

I can honestly say the movie exceeded my expectations, because it was just not at all what I expected. I found it to be genuinely funny in many places (really crass in others though), and fairly inventive when it came to staging the action sequences. The highway scene is worth the price of admission alone.

I love the Transformers. I have watched the original animated film more times than I can count. I think Orson Welles should have received a posthumous best supporting actor nomination for his voice-work as Unicron (I’m not really sure if I’m joking or not). Hell, I walk around some days singing, (You’ve Got) The Touch like a coked-out Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. (Sadly, I’m not joking about that). The death of Optimus Prime was like my generation’s version of the assassination of JFK. Or maybe just my own. The point is that the stupid toy-hawking commercial of a television show was actually good. It taught you things. Things like the versatility of Energon (I believe it helped spark the interest in fuel cell technology that we see today.) It taught you that robots could be just as horrible shots as GI Joes. Okay, so maybe it just taught you how to go buy more toys, but if that's not American, then I don't know what is.

Bay’s movies have never offended me the way say a Brett Ratner project does. He makes big dumb movies where lots of things blow-up, but the movies seem to at least know they’re really dumb. (I refuse to believe for one minute that Armageddon is a serious picture on any level.) The movies may be brainless, but they are quite competently directed. Bay's visual sense and eye for spectacle are pretty damned spectacular.

In retrospect, Bay made perfect sense for this project. He obviously respects the property (I mean for god's sake, he got Peter Cullen to do Optimus's voice!). He gets the small details that make fanboys like myself get all warm and fuzzy (tell me hearing the classic transformation sound on the big screen in THX doesn't make you squeal like a 7-year old girl). He doesn’t get everything right (complete misappropriation of the name Devastator; complete waste of one of the all-time great righthand-henchman in Starscream; the Autobot Jazz is worthy of his own separate post and an honorary spot in the Negro Hall of Shame). He makes up for these oversights with a movie that hits just the right tone on most occassions. It never takes itself too seriously (it's about 3-story transforming robots after all), but it also doesn't allow itself to turn into a dumb cartoon.

The movie is too long by about 35-45 minutes. I’d have chopped out everything dealing with Qatar and the Pentagon. The movie should have focused on LaBeouf’s character and Bumblebee trying to stay ahead of the Decepticons and the Sector 7 government MIBs. But hey, nobody’s giving me $200MM to go out and make a Transformers movie, so I’ll just shut my pie hole.

At the end of the day, the movie has its faults, but it’s entertaining as hell (in fact the movie entertains you into submission). And I look at it this way: at least we didn’t get Tim Story directing.

Bestest Summer Flicks:
Ratatouille
Knocked Up
Sicko
Hot Fuzz
Transformers