T R A N S F O R M E R S

Return to the Main Page

Summary:
Sam Witwicky is the great grandson of an explorer who first comes across a Transformer, a sentient being that can transform from a piece of technology into a robot. The Transformers are good and bad, both looking for The Cube, which can provide intelligence to anything that comes into contact with it. War has begun.

Review:
Ooooooh, crap. I knew there wasn't much hope for this flick, seeing as how our prodigy genius Michael Bay is behind the works on this one. The thing is, I'm always surprised by how BAD he can actually make his movies! This is another example of his lack of talents. Granted, I was pleasantly surprised with the ho-hum but watchable The Island, and that was one of the reasons I considered the potential for passable entertainment here. Why did I even hope at all?

It's a given that the character "development" would be sub-par. Once again, Bay manages to overachieve in his failures. Instead of being sub-par, it is worse than embarrassing. From the first scene in which some Army soldiers are talking to each other in a helicopter, I was straining to keep my eyes from rolling around in my head. Then, they identify a chopper flying towards the base camp that was shot down a month prior, and the Commander says "Check it again". Then, some nubhead says "I checked twice, sir. It is the one. I had a friend on that chopper." Who gives a fuck? Does that verify anything other than you can provide information no one needs to know?
Meanwhile, Decepticons are hacking into the government's highest security files. The Secretary of Defense and his underlings are all posturing and exposing their idiocracy with such phrases as "this is way too sophisticated for Iranians. It could be Russia, North Korea or maybe China." That's it. Let's pigeonhole this massively unbelievable and impossible hacking job into an ENTIRE COUNTRY. North Korea has technology and computer know-how that goes beyond CHINA? Hold up... Why would you say Russia is doing this again? Oh, because whoever wrote this shite doesn't know the first thing about anything. Wonderful.
In the mix of these super-intelligent individuals is a highly intelligent bleach-blond hotty who looks like she spends her time on the beach and in tanning salons, along with a couple of her preppy buddies. Including an Asian dude. Way to work on fixing the demographic on that one!

Meanwhile, back at the lodge, Shia LeBeouf is working like a champ to keep his unfortunate on screen presence within the realms of acceptability. I have to give him a lot of props for his worthy efforts. I don't blame him choosing to be in such a high profile movie. It's a decent career move. Even more decent is how much he shines over the rest of the cast. This is most evident when he's pitted side by side against one of the worst acting performances I've seen since Francis Coppola's daughter shat all over Godfather Part III. Megan Fox did nothing in Transformers except look hot according to Bay's opinion of hotness, which means to appear as dull as possible, in which the brownness of one's fake tan becomes deeper than the hollow vapidity that exudes from the aura of her actual so-called acting "performance". She was so stoic and emotionless in her performance that I sometimes wonder if she was actually alive. Perhaps she herself was a Transformer. She looked manufactured, and seemed to have to process each sentence in her head, but was too mechanical to understand the concept of emotion. What the hell, man?

OK, so the humans suck in this movie, but most important should be the action scenes. I have to say, I wasn't even impressed with THAT. The opening attack sequence by Starscream was lame. Lots of neat explosions, yes, but explosions do not a good action scene make. When Bumblebee gets his first chase sequence against Barricade (a Camaro vs. a cop car), lame-ass rock music starts up, an unworthy cue for the audience to be "pumped up". If there's one thing Bay has proven he can do well, it's car chases. This car chase was lame. Lamer than lame. It was pathetic. There are a couple more car chases scenes, none of which were all that enthralling.
Even more devastating were any other moments in which the action was supposed to be making us happy. How can action scenes be exciting when first of all you can tell that they filmed an empty back alley and filled it in later with CGI products? Then, how can this be exciting to watch when all you see DURING the action is a slew of blurry, mediocre CGI renderings smearing across the screen? How can this be "good"? Then of course, all of this is mucked up with endless spinning circular cameras, usually from the waist height upwards, making me as dizzy as all get out.

I hated this movie. There is hardly anything redeeming about Transformers. It doesn't work as nostalgia more than as a piece of nausea. Badly written, horrible story concept. The Transformers learned to talk from "The World Wide Web." That's strange, considering that Megatron (who is named such about 8 times before he says his first line, which is "I... am... Megatron") was on earth about 100 years before the internet ever existed. Don't even get me started with that eBay bullshit. It's unfunny, the special effects suck, the action scenes are uninspired and boring, the cinematography feels like it was just setting up a steady cam and walking in circles or overhead to be "energetic"... I can't think of one redeeming factor for this abomination of my childhood memories. Not even Peter Cullen coming back as Optimus is really worth mentioning. Big Fucking Deal if everything else is done wrong.

It's just another one of those Michael Bay clunkers that can be added to the rest of his financially successful slew of craptastic heaps of overlong strips of celluloid. Like many others have done in the past, this transformer blows.

GRADE:  F

Reviewed 9/4/07