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Transformers
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: July 4, 2007

The film itself is the merchandising spin-off this time, as Hasbro releases a live-action mega-budget popcorn flick based on their line of toys from the 1980s. You might think a film based on a line of toys would be cynical, childish, and generally awful, and although you wouldn’t necessarily be right about that, you would, in the case of Transformers, be circumstantially 100% correct. This film is a gigantic throbbing soulless sinister vacuum cleaner designed to cleanse families of their disposable income. And like any giant squirming pulsating vacuum cleaner, it sucks, big time.

Transformers is directed by Michael Bay, who even before this project was already the world’s most cynical filmmaker. Bay is the director of The Rock, Armageddon, and The Island, and I will say this for him: He has a signature style. His films all have a particular look and rhythm, and that makes him an artist, of sorts. It’s just that his art is almost criminally wrong-headed. His movies do not merely coddle Attention Deficit Disorder, and they do not merely cause A.D.D. either. They insist upon a world plagued by ruined attention spans.

Perhaps the most disturbing symptom of this man’s work is the way the listening and pondering is edited out of human interaction, as if words can only be transmitted, but never received. Two-and-a-half hours of this cacophonous loneliness is downright upsetting. Furthermore, the cameras are always moving, always moving, gliding left, circling right, pulling up, swooping down, from shot to shot, shot to shot, restless like the director, fearful of silence, fearful of stillness, all those hot, hot, hot potatoes tossed back and forth even when an actor is simply trying to stand there delivering his dialogue. Even when Michael Bay has a proper cinematic asset in his hands, like a nicely framed shot, or a punch line in the dialogue, he just jams the thing into the blender with everything else.

Unfortunately for civilization, Michael Bay has a major card up his sleeve this time; his film delivers a special effect none of us has seen before. I’m referring, of course, to the “transforming.” Once upon a time it was a Hasbro gimmick. The Transformers toy line featured cars, trucks, and planes that could be rearranged to resemble humanoid robots. These things hit the market back in the 80s, and now that CGI special effects have caught up with the concept, we have a movie to celebrate the occasion.

So in Transformers the movie, jet fighters dive bomb toward the earth and then reassemble themselves, mid-air, into monstrous karate robots. Cars and trucks suddenly stand on two feet and assume warrior stances. Good and evil robots, about ten of them in all, begin using our city streets as a battleground. And it’s a genuine spectacle. That’s because a top-notch CGI crew was hired to create the money shots for this picture. The images they’ve delivered are, for the moment, unique, and that asset will carry this film between now and the inevitable and not-too-distant day when those same money shots become commonplace and tiresome on commercial television. And on that day, the acting and the dialogue will be left high and dry.

Which reminds me: There are actors in this film, notably Shia Lebeouf, who made a strong impression earlier this year in the teen thriller Disturbia, but who takes several steps backwards this time, with a highly annoying performance as a kid befriended by his hot rod robot sentinel. Lebeouf’s performance consists of shouting “No No No!” or occasionally “No No No NOOOOOO!” in between nervous sputtering pleas of self-misrepresentation to parents, girlfriend, teacher, cops, giant robots, and everyone else trapped in a movie that forbids them to listen. The film also features the great John Turturro as the obligatory buffoonish government secret agent, somehow so shadowy he is unfamiliar to the nation’s Secretary of Defense, and at the same time more hapless and incompetent than anyone else around him. Defenders of this film would tell me his character is “funny” and “ironic,” and I suppose he is funny and ironic, rather like a Nerf sledgehammer would be.

As far as the story is concerned, the first hour is merely ridiculous, and then the film transforms into something worse, during an endless and supposedly comedic sequence with 30-foot robots “hiding” in the back yard, and Lebeouf ransacking his own bedroom for his grandfather’s magic spectacles, and Lebeouf’s parents barging in and asking him if he’s been masturbating, and so on. It all goes on for about fifteen minutes. From there Turturro’s character appears and begins clowning around in the stock Michael Bay role of the establishment dork. And then, incredibly, the movie has the audacity to reference King Kong. It’s a positively laughable scene in which one of the benevolent robots gets waylaid by heartless humans. As the score becomes suddenly solemn, and as Lebeouf begins shouting “No no no NOOOOOO!” we watch the robot get lassoed, and pulled wheezing and bewildered to the ground.

Sorry Michael Bay, but I’m not going there. That thing isn’t King Kong. It’s a Camaro with an identity crisis.         

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld