Nothing more than meets the eye but it doesn't have to be

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2007)

"Transformers" is so far the most fun I have as far as this year's Hollywood summer blockbusters are concerned. On one hand, it's not saying much considering the barrage of underwhelming "three-quels" the past two months (plus the mediocre second installment of "Fantastic Four"). But then again, there's just something sublime in seeing your childhood memories unraveling on the big screen: those hunks of metals transforming from pieces of automobiles to highly advanced metallic sentient, and vice versa.
Sam Witwicky (current Hollywood it-guy Shia LaBeouf) has just got a new car, who actually turns out to be the Autobot Bumblebee, an alien tasked to protect Sam, who is in a possession of something his great-great-grandfather owned, and which is vital to the Decepticons' plan of destroying humankind and conquering Earth. Meanwhile, as the US military led by Secretary of Defense Keller (John Voight) is scrambling to figure out who is trying to hack into their computer system and stealing classified files, Sam and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) must evade the Decepticon Barricade as well as from the mysterious Agent Simmons (John Turturro) who claims himself from the government group Sector 7.
It's nostalgia at its finest. Director Michael Bay, executive producer Steven Spielberg, and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman work on this factor and the result is more of an adult-skewed film that zeros in on audience members weaned on a retrospective mode. Sure, it isn't high-brow art nor does it boast of an intricate plot, but come on, who expects that? While the script needed more coherence and focus (do summer blockbusters nowadays really have to have, like, three subplots per movie?), Bay's trademark acerbic humor and stylish perpetually-on-motion shots work most of the time, except during the climactic battle scenes where you wish the director would take a barbiturate or something, just to at least know who's fighting whom. The film has impressive CGI and the robots are quite stunning, more of stylized versions of their cartoon counterparts. LaBeouf provides a solid central human figure, ably backed up by Fox, Turturro, Anthony Anderson (as a computer hacker), and Kevin Dunn (as Sam's father).
All in all it wasn't a definitive adaptation , but I have to admit it was fun to watch. Ultimately, it's nothing more than a Michael Bay-ified Saturday morning cartoon, but it really didn't have to be anything more than that. It may be empty calories but it was fun while it lasted and there were no regrets afterwards. The robots did their thing and it was a smash.