Transformers

by Brian Zitzelman

Driving the hour long trek to see Transformers, an interesting situation occurred. I was followed, nearly the entire drive, by a massive semi-truck, looming in my rearview. I wondered which sign was this. Was the creeping truck trying to tell me to accept my love for Autobots and Decepticons, to embrace Michael Bay’s blow it all up film or did it indicate an impending disaster, slowly leering closer as if I was stuck in Duel.

Based on the hit cartoon series, stemming from a toy line, Transformers is likely to be one of the king's of the summer blockbuster season. The story is simple: big robots that can turn into cars, planes or whatever, smack one another around, humans help where they can and loud noises ensue. Somehow, Michael Bay and his own army of five writers forgot the straightforwardness of the Transformers tale, feeding it odd doses of teenage melodrama, government conspiracies and a spoonful of bad screwball comedy. A deluge of plotlines spring forth, the core of which focuses on Shia LaBeouf’s Sam, a high school student, struggling with girls, his ebay auctions and attempts at getting his first car. The great great-grandson of an explorer who ventured to the Arctic and went mad, Sam holds a key component to the incoming alien robot battle set to take place on Earth.

LaBeouf, as well as the majority of the cast, does a fine job. He runs, sweats and rambles with ease, doing what he can with a plainly written role. His sidekick is arguably the standout of the transforming bunch, the silent (minus when he gives a few words advice through songs on the radio), yellow sports car Bumblebee. The two spend a surprisingly long amount of time, not quite bonding, but hanging out for the film’s first hour, which clunks along elsewhere, spending time with soldiers, hackers and politicians. The duo work nicely together, nothing memorable but it does the job adequately.

Michael Bay has made a name with car flips, fiery crashes and lots of wreckage speeding towards the camera. He has been touted as a perfect match for Transformers, a film fit for said flips, crashes and wreckage. Oddly, Bay’s camerawork is misdirected. By too many of the battling bots looking alike, with cogs and wheels in abundance, Bay unwisely shoots large chunks of the rampages with close ups, leaving out any context or clarity to the goings on - the fine work done by ILM mirrors someone shaking a toolbox and not gargantuan creatures pummeling everything in sight to bits. Two scenes manage to standout. A freeway fight snaps with energy and excitement, with a barreling might and the initial scuffle between Bumblebee and a nasty black cop car is a blast. Yet, the latter is a prime example of the movie’s flaws. Bay and company focus not on the awe of the occasion, as two 20 feet tall robots duel, but rather on Sam getting annoyed by a Jawa sounding little boom box that not only irritates, it manages to get equal or more screen time than fan favorites Starscream and the big man himself, Optimus Prime.

Fluidity is vacant in the 144 minute feature, which feels every second of it. Whenever an ounce of tension threatens to creep into Transformers, Bay scoots it aside for excruciating bouts of giant robots stepping on someone’s grass or worse yet, twin scenes of random urination. Truly, does the great John Turturro need to be reduced to getting pissed on by colossal machines? Not so much. It all ends when, well, once the credits roll, and not to anything reminiscent of a sufficient climax. It is as if the entire Transformers creative team saw all the mistakes could be excellent blockbusters have made in recent years, the excessive lengths, bloated stories and dull scores, and said collectively, “We can do that too!”