My childhood up on screen....sort of

Rating: 9/10 (18 September 2012)

For me just hearing the words "Autobot" and "Decepticon" brings back so many childhood memories. I was a massive fan of the G1 cartoons (never watched any of the spin-offs) and the Marvel comic books from the UK and US. The cartoon appealed to me as a child, while the comics took the mythos deeper in my teenage years with cosmic battles between Gods, a yin/ yang conversation regarding why certain Transformers are inherently good or evil. It was cracking stuff and it was with a lot of excitement that I greeted news of a new big budget movie.
Transformers (2007) delivered! OK, so they fiddled with the origin story a little bit, but so do most of the different versions of the show. I thought they got the major characters spot on. Optimus, Bumblebee, Megatron and Starscream were all the same characters as in the TV show and comics. I really liked the fact that Bumblebee could only communicate through radio signals, and, after the execrable scene introducing the minor autobot characters and Optimus Prime's various sermons, really wish that had been the case for all of the autobots. The decepticons are far more interesting, though we see nowhere near enough of Starscream. Megatron and Soundwave are both effective and the best realised characterisations in the film.
The humans in the story all do a good job. Shia Lebeouf had not yet been over exposed, and is actually quite entertaining as Spike. Megan Fox was a smoking hot brunette bombshell, still playing a stereotype (hot girl with a blokey hobby who deep down just wants to fit in), but at least not a damsel in distress as we typically see in these films. Spike's parents are awkward, but funny. John Turtorro's character seems to have accidentally stumbled into this film during a coffee break from a Coen brothers film. He seems like he has something much more interesting to do in an edgier film than this one. But his presence, while out of place, is welcome.
My big complaint with this is that the the film, after doing a nice job of setting up for a finale, seems to go in light speed in its last twenty minutes. It's often difficult to tell who's fighting who. There's also a death scene that we are supposed to feel sad about, involving a character who's been in a handful of scenes, and had a maximum of two lines of clichéd stereotyped dialogue. The resolution is neat and sets up well for a sequel. Overall, this was a reasonably faithful big screen portrayal of the characters I loved growing up, if not the story. The arrival sequence, and Armageddon-ish soundtrack are both breathtaking and really hammer home a sense of awe and wonder as the Autobots arrive. The awkward attempts by Prime to communicate with humanity are funny. The human characters, apart from Turtorro (who acts like no human I've ever met) all seem to react to the Transformers and their war in the way a normal human being would react. It is a very different back story and beloved elements like the Autobot and decepticons Volcano and underwater bases are lost. But what's left is a the characters we love fighting out the same war, in a way a new generation will find accessible, and didn't alienate me, well not in this original version anyway. I am more than happy to share Optimus, Megatron and Bumblebee with a new generation of fans.