What plot? CGI and Action Carries It All

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2007)

Remember about 11 years ago, when some giant flying saucers hovered over Earth, people in computer labs intercepted signals, and a few protagonists around the globe slowly marched toward their role in saving the Earth, with plenty of involvement from the military along the way? Transformers, not surprisingly, nearly duplicates this plot. To call it an homage to Independence Day maybe be giving director Michael Bay too much credit, but in any case it doesn't really matter. I would call Transformers more exciting, more visceral, and ten times more pulse pounding than the patriotic Earth against aliens film of 11 years ago. True, it does lack in coherent plot and character development, but all that will be completely forgotten once you see these titanium titans clash.
Shia LeBeouf, as always competently playing a young affable teenager, plays Sam Witwicky, a high schooler who has a crush and purchases a car to impress her. Little does he know his car is actually an Autobot, the good guy half of a race of biogenic aliens, on Earth to investigate if something called the Cube is there, a super-powerful object that could enable the Decepticons, the bad guy half, to destroy all life on Earth and create their own robotic planet. Several subplots abound, including a middle Eastern one with a young general played by Josh Duhamel and a Pentagon/Washington one with the secretary of Defense played by Jon Voight (good, of course, but not very memorable).
Oh, Jon Voight could have easily given a full-out performance, but he's not going to kid himself. It's not about him. It's about the bombastically bad-ass battling bots. The crashing metal and strangely modulated towering voices. The leaning forward in your seat to catch every detail during the fantastic battle scenes, which, had they been done wrong, would have made the movie a complete flop. Fortunately for all of us, the effects do not disappoint in any way. I got exactly everything I was expecting, and then some. The effects and action are perfectly entertaining and serve up a healthy platter of adrenaline-pumping, pulse-pounding, teeth-clenching robot butt-kicking. The final battle scene is so mind-blowing and perfect in its execution that the robots almost seem graceful as they smash and crash all over the place. This isn't art, it's entertainment, and it's wonderfully done entertainment from the sometimes overly-criticized Michael Bay.
I'll admit, when I first saw the trailer, I was very excited, but then I saw Bay's name plastered across the movie screen. I was like, "Crap. He directed the Island, didn't he? CRAP. Armageddon. Oh sh--. Pearl Harbor. Bad Boys II. Bad boys. The Rock.I'm going to hate this movie, aren't I?" Coming out of the theater, though, I realized there really wasn't anyone else who could have created a spectacle of this magnitude. Bay never lets anything else but the robots take center stage, and boy what a chaos-ridden magnificent stage it turns out to be. A conglomeration of product placement and sheer heavy metal, it's a wonder anything here manages to shine through. Voight, the pathetic script, the non-existent plot, all of them pale in comparison with the towering transformers, but of all people, LeBoeuf manages to make the biggest impression, emerging straight out of backwater, mediocre sci-fi action pics like I,Robot and Constantine to come straight into the public eye with this sure-fire massive moneymaker, bringing an incredibly personal and easygoing element to this otherwise jam-packed roller-coaster ride of a movie. If anybody but LeBoeuf had been in the main role, the entire thing would have felt like a impersonal spectacle designed solely to make money out of a toy franchise. Sure, it's all those things and more, but in a world of crashing metal and falling debris it's always good to have a character you can relate to and laugh with, and LeBoeuf pulls off that character effortlessly.
I'm not going to mince any words on trying to explain the plot further or pretending like there's anything more to this movie than what I've already talked about. After watching this movie I knew two things. 1. Giant Battling Robots are the Coolest Thing Ever. 2. For some reason I really wanted a GMC truck and some Mountain Dew. (Can you believe that at one point a Mountain Dew machine transforms into a Decepticon?) Though the product placement may get out of control sometimes, it didn't really bother me, and what do you expect in a movie that features talking cars? No car label at all? Give me a break.
Transformers was advertised as nothing more than a jet-fueled, action-propelled roller-coaster, and it delivers in every way. It reminded me a little bit of Alien Vs. Predator, which came out a couple of years ago, but made the mistake of setting the epic confrontation between the two alien races a few thousand feet underneath the arctic, with about three total confrontations between the aliens and the predators. Transformers isn't afraid to go rampaging in broad daylight, obliterating much of downtown LA. It also beats out its similar predecessor, Independence Day, in that it doesn't waste too much screen-time trying to develop the paper-thin personalities of numerous unimportant small characters. (ID had about six or seven of those, fifteen if you count the whole cast.) Most of the action thankfully centers around LeBoeuf and the Pentagon, never distracting too much from the film's central theme: Transformers. Heck, Transformers may even be the central summer flick of 2007. It's that epic, that good, and that satisfying. Now let's all sit down, and wait patiently for Transformers 2, because the film leaves it wide open and nearly begging for a sequel. Thank goodness.