Movie Review: TRANSFORMERS
Back at the start of 2007, I found myself in the regular position of talking movies whilst drunk in a pub with some mates. We were discussing the impending Summer Blockbuster Season and how it was going to be one of the most jam-packed in quite a few years. “I’ll be there every bloody weekend for like four months, the rate they’re going to be releasing these things!” said one friend. “Fuck it! Too many sequels, I’m waiting for the DVD releases!” said another. What seemed to be the general consensus though was that this was unarguably the summer of the “three-quel” and that any movie that happened to trundle into the path of the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Shrek the Third or Spider-Man 3 was… well… the resulting carnage would be entirely of their own doing!
We were talking around the time that Stallone’s sixth outing as Rocky was looking to be held back even longer and end up debuting in the UK around August (until it’s surprising success stateside saw it get shifted back to it’s original end-of-January UK release) and I proffered whether anyone thought that this year could actually be the year of the ‘80’s-hero-revisited’. “You know,” I said, “like Rocky 6, Die Hard 4 and Transformers could just come out of nowhere and own the whole summer blockbuster season?”
I was nigh on laughed out of the pub. “You’re talking about a Rocky film after number five killed the franchise where we’re going to have a pensioner taking on a young bloke and probably winning and shouting ‘Yo Adrian’ again and it’s just going to be embarrassing!” said one friend. “Die Hard 4? Directed by the man who did those Underworld movies? Forget it!” said another. Best of all though, came another friend with another quick put-down; “Transformers? A fucking Michael Bay movie based on toy figures from two decades ago? It’s going to be a disaster!” “Yeah,” I replied, “But look at 2004. That was meant to be the Year of the Matrix and a friggin’ film based on a theme park ride came and stole everyone’s attention!” “That had Johnny Depp in it dude, who the hell does Transformers have?” “The kid out of Holes?” I offered.
I present this unnecessary anecdote masked as a tangent to you, my dear reader, because it gives me the opportunity to present a bit of an “I-told-you-so” moment: Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was an admittedly entertaining ride but it was bloated and flawed too. Shrek the Third rode along comfortably on the audience’s love for the characters but showed signs that it was a franchise suffering from staleness already with two other films and two spin-offs already lined up to drive every last stinking dollar out of the series. And Spider-Man 3? A horrendously chaotic, over-cooked and rather turgid blockbuster experience with more egotism attached to itself then it had any right to have.
Instead, Rocky VI opened up the year making (DVD receipts included) a huge $200 million return on a $36 million budget and warm/affectionate reviews. Die Hard 4.0 is doing massive business over here in the UK, extremely respectable business in the US and is attracting surprisingly glowing reviews in the majority of publications – many rightly pointing out that it has been both the best sequel and strongest blockbuster of the season so far.
And now we arrive at Transformers – a film blessed with no less than four and five star reviews in every newspaper and magazine I have read and enormous, record-breaking box office receipts from ONE day of release alone in the US and, to be honest, the best word of mouth I have heard about a summer blockbuster in a long, long time. Just recently a friend of mine who works for Warner Bros. distribution here in the UK e-mailed me and said “Transformers is the film other movies need to just walk away from without even attempting to fight – it’s the Jurassic Park for a new generation!”
So to all those who ragged on me and laughed at my suggestion about this being the year of the ‘80’s-hero-revisited’ I blow a raspberry in your general direction. But after a sneak-peek prior to its July 27th UK release (and its July 21st and 22nd preview weekend) what’s MY opinion about the film itself?
Well… It’s pointless in pushing out a plot description or general synopsis. This is nothing more than giant good robots battling giant evil robots on Earth with humans trapped in the middle. Nothing more and certainly nothing less. However, what is most surprising is that because we’re dealing with admittedly the most superb special effects ever seen in a blockbuster movie (they are THAT good – believe the hype!) for ‘characters’ with thousands upon thousands of separate mechanical moving parts, banging and clattering into one another whilst directed by Michael Bay’s usual attention-deficit style of directing and editing, the very thing that this film is solely based around turns out to be the most distracting and hard-to-view of the entire movie. You can’t get a real sense of what is actually going on in the robot battles and it’s very hard to connect with what is nothing more than fast whirls, blurs and smacks and bangs of images.
The Transformers – the very thing that every single person is going to be going to this movie to see – were, as fantastic as they look, pretty under-whelming to me personally. The dialogue they were given and the various “personalities” each one was assigned (‘gangster rap’ speaking robot? No thanks!) didn’t excite me anywhere close to the way I thought they would. The fact that you’re an hour or so in before you meet the Transformers “hero” and another thirty or so minutes thereafter before you meet the “villain” was initially very disconcerting and makes it hard to be invested in these characters and their objectives. Then again, as I said, this is a giant robot movie and nothing more so do you really need to give a shit about such things when you just want to see Robot A kick Robot B in the face?
I was never a huge Transformers fan in the 80s (I was more of a Thundercats boy!) so all the grumbles about Bumblebee not being a VW beetle or Optimus Prime having flames on his body etc. etc. don’t really register to me personally. I do know that the ‘moveable lips’ thing was extremely distracting seeing as no other robot had them. I also know that having Megatron be a “jet” when one of his other henchmen was also a “jet” and another was a “helicopter” meant it was very hard – with Bay’s editing style once again – to understand which villain was doing what to whom.
So seeing as this was a movie about giant robots battling each other and I’m telling you that I failed to connect with the barrage of quick-cuts, blurs and unidentifiable images that made up the majority of their all-important battles, then this film must be a total failure right? Wrong! Not at all! Far from it in fact!
I had an absolute blast with this film – loved it in fact! And you know what; it was actually in spite of the Transformers and not because of them. I think I’m the first “critic” to actually take this approach but for me, it was the “human element” that entertained the hell out of me in this film. The characters were so well-etched and so brilliantly performed across the board that the Transformers were almost a subplot in their own movie.
Shia LaBeouf has proven in this film that all the publicity he’s getting about being the “star of the future” is entirely true – he’s funny, charming, competently dramatic where he needs to be and always interesting to watch. Megan Fox (only previously known to me, from my time as a chronic insomniac, for her role in the god-awful sitcom Hope & Faith, shown here in the UK in the early hours of the morning) was as sexy and as talented as she needed to be and proved fun to watch. I even really enjoyed Josh Duhamel’s performance as the ‘Ben Affleck’ character. The real gems though, were the likes of Jon Voight, Kevin Dunn, Bernie Mac, John Turturro and Rachael Taylor who were all never anything less than entertaining. Turturro, especially, all but steals the film with his manic one-liner spouting role as the ‘Sector Seven’ Agent out to bring LaBeouf’s character into custody.
The two things that surprised me the most about this film was 1) that, unlike Die Hard 4.0, the film still had a whole host of surprises that hadn’t been entirely spent-up in the marketing campaign and 2) that the whole film had such a surprisingly light and funny coating to it. There are a whole host of laugh-out-loud moments running throughout this. This most certainly is not the typical poe-faced Michael Bay outing a la Pearl Harbour or the sublime Armageddon. I suppose the biggest surprise though, outside of those aforementioned two, was just how much I loved the bits of the film that I thought I would hate (the “human” schtick) and kind of got bored by the stuff I thought I would love (the robots beating the shit out of robots!). That’s not to say that there aren’t stunning action sequences involving the transformers. No, that’s not the case. A desert assault between the soldiers and ‘Scorponok’ was fantastic, as was Bumblebee’s attempt to protect his young owner from the evil transforming police car whose name I made no note of. Then there’s the film’s standout moment; downtown LA serving as a battle ground between the humans, the good robots and the bad robots. The action is fantastic – it’s only the robot on robot stuff that didn’t work for me as well as I thought it would. There is, however, still something unarguably cool about seeing giant robots blowing the shit out of stuff whilst us humans run, screaming and scattering!
This is Michael Bay’s second shortest film (still running at 144 minutes though) and I thought it would play far too long and self-indulgently but it didn’t from my first viewing. Yes, the film takes a huge amount of time in getting to the “big set piece” that everybody is going to be going to see it for – the stand-off in downtown LA between US soldiers and giant robots battling each other – but that’s because, for the first time in a Michael Bay film since The Rock, the director is taking his time to draw his characters to our attention and, surprisingly, make us care for them. There are not many other blockbusters you can say that about so far this year. I mean, did you really give a shit whether Will or Elizabeth lived or died in POTC3 or Mary-Jane in Spider-Man 3?
Spielberg’s influence on the production (as executive-producer, and an allegedly hands-on one at that) is ever present in the surprisingly effective scenes involving a boy-and-his-car. It is this sort of thing, melded perfectly with Bay’s obsession with all things military and bombastic set-pieces that make this into such a brilliant blockbuster ride.
You all know that I’ve got a hard-on for most of Michael Bay’s output so as long as this film had spinning camera jobs, orange filters, rock songs on the soundtrack, a car chase (actually one of the most disappointing scenes in this film, surprisingly!) and the odd-bit of slow-motion in amongst all of the gun firing and explosions, then I’d be a very happy little camper. Easily pleased or what? But let me say that as typical as a Michael Bay film as this is – and it is – with Spielberg’s guiding hand, it’s above and beyond what you’d expect in terms of the light tone in presents and the huge amount of comedy it infuses itself with.
It’s far from perfect and it’s pretty friggin’ stupid stuff all truth be told but, when it comes down to it, it’s a huge effects-driven action extravaganza and the only thing that you need to ask is whether it’s worth your ticket price and whether it is entertaining. The only answer I can give is that Hell Yes it’s worth the admission and no matter what flaws you feel it presents and no matter how dizzying and discombobulating watching robots battling robots actually is, it’s one hell of a movie experience all the same!
You’re going to go for the robots but you’re going to leave thanking the human cast! This is strong blockbuster filmmaking even in the face of chaotic and confusing editing, and it’s well, well, well worth a look!
NB: Yes, I know that the “good” robots are Autobots and the “bad” ones are Decipticons but I tried writing the review using those titles and I just couldn’t – it made the film sound way more serious then it actually is. Good robots and Bad robots give the film, when described, the childish and fun edge that you should go in expecting!
This review was first published in July-07 on Filmrot.com
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