Noisy and expensive but offers little else

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2007)

The US secretary of defence calls together all experts at his disposal to try and decode a signal that will reveal who just wiped out a military base in Qatar in an attempt to hack into the central computer network. Had they known that a small group of survivors had made it out led by Captain Lennox, they would have known that the attack was a helicopter that changed into a robot and used devastating weapons to destroy everything. Meanwhile, back in the US, nobody officially knows anything so the fact that high school student Sam Witwicky believes his second hand car has a mind of its own, gets him nothing but trouble. But could he be a bigger piece in the puzzle than anyone knows?
In the middle of a disappointing summer for blockbusters, I must admit that Transformers went from being one I was planning to see, to become yet another film that I had no desire to rush to be disappointed by. However my girlfriend took me along and I suppose it helped that really nothing about the film suggested that I should expect anything from it. With this in mind I found it mildly entertaining in a simple-minded and noisy way, but this is very different from saying it is a "good" film.
I sort of fall in a strange place in regards viewing the film because technically I should be a massive fan and very touchy over the details. I loved the toys as a child and got the weekly comic until it finished in the UK at issue 300-something but then on the other hand I really have few affectionate memories of them (and all the possessions are gone!). To a point I did think "well, that's wrong" here and there but really I didn't care that much. What bothered me more were the countless weaknesses in areas I would associate with storytelling and film-making rather than the details of a fictional race of robots. First I suppose I should give credit to the effects, because this is what the film is all about. They are excellent and they were so convincingly real that I never found myself looking for the joins. The scale of them does mean it all gets a bit frantic at times and too often I lost track of what was happening.
Too often though, the action didn't engage because I just didn't really care about the characters  human or not. This problem is nothing that any extra money spent on effects can solve because it comes from the writing, the acting and the total delivery of the film; I am finding it more and more  too many films are doing whatever effects allow them, rather than letting the film dictate the effects to be used. Anyway, the script is full of clunky dialogue and has all the narrative logic of a drunken argument after closing time. It is best not to ask too much about the importance of Witwicky etc because it has all the strength of wet tissue paper, obviously hoping that action will help cover up all the cracks.
The dialogue is just as poor and nobody really comes off talking like a normal person. Of course with such a lacklustre collection of performances, it doesn't really matter so much what words they have to say. LaBeouf is so-so while Fox has a good body and a very impressive tan  neither of them would make me see one of her films again but I suppose pretty young actresses will never want for work (well, so long as everything is as tight as it is at age 21 I guess). Duhamel is bland and even Tyrese lacks spark. Voight and Turturro are both weak and seem even worse due to both of them having been much better than this. The voice work from Cullen, Ryan and others is a nice touch and mostly avoids being corny. The actors aren't helped by the messy direction from Bay. On one hand he is delivering a silly comedy, on the other it is an all-out action movie with a budget that could fund a small country. The comedy is more daft than funny and the romance side is just plain dumb. Action is delivered with a typical lack of restraint and lack of understanding for what makes engaging action  so instead we get the usual grand music and sweeping camera shots.
Overall then, the film has loads of noise and lots of money right up there on the screen. However it doesn't have a good script, characters, performances, tension, excitement or memorable content. The summer crowd looking for noise, action and nothing else will find their boxes ticked, however those looking for more will find little.