Beyond Brainless but Mostly Good Fun

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2007)

Let's face it, when working for Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay could make an entertaining movie about a guy peeling a potato. We're into some serious trade-craft with these guys. From effects to casting to pacing -- as something to take your mind off your troubles for a couple hours, you could do a lot worse than this spectacle based on a children's TV show.
The new Michael Bay film "Transformers" chronicles the adventures of a race of alien mechanical lifeforms and their human allies as they seek to deprive less enlightened Transformers of control over a magic cube that can turn a toaster into a terminator. Sound stupid? Oh, you bet it is.
But when a Blackhawk helicopter lands at a U.S. military base and then "transforms" into a giant lumbering robot that lays waste to everything in its path, with effects so realistic as to be eye-popping, the menace was palpable and frightening.
Along the way we get your standard boy-and-his-dog, boy-and-his-Camaro, come-from-behind Woody-Allenesque tale of some dippy nerd who manages to woo the hottest hottie away from the football jock in an earnest v. yearnless 2-scene battle of puny proportions a la every Hollywood script ever written.
But if you pair your giant killer robots up with an absurdly appealing Megan Fox as the hottie in question, you are gonna have a hard time making a movie 99 out of a hundred American men are not going to enjoy. And goofy though it was, I'd have to count myself among the 99. It was a good time at the movies and there's just no two ways about it.
Here's a few things I think they could have done differently:
First, the volume and mass of the robots seems off when they "transform" into vehicles and back again. When they're robots they seem much bigger than the vehicles they can turn into. If you stood a Camaro on end and give it some legs, it seems you'd only achieve half the height of the robot we're seeing. But I'm probably just being picky.
Second, I understand it's desirable to have expressive faces of some kind, but if these alien creatures can morph into roughly any manufactured piece of equipment, wouldn't they just grow speakers instead of anthropomorphic mouths with which to speak? Just splitting hairs, here.
Third, the processes and scope of evolution are probably far vaster than even our smartest smart guys can fathom but it seems HIGHLY dubious that a race of machines could evolve without, presumably, the impetus of some organic life form initiating it. But hey, I guess in a nearly infinite universe, the possibilities are similarly infinite.
And last but not least, these machine warriors, sadly, are probably playing heroes to a segment of the U.S. population's children growing up without a lot of moral or intellectual curiosity around them. These kids will grow up asking themselves what would "Optimus Prime" do when Billy from the trailer next door steals my Slurpee at the NASCAR trials. You know, when dad's passed out on Meth and mom's working her third job, kids face these dilemmas. And this is why you have to be careful with what you show these potential heroes doing and how they treat their enemies.
And THIS is why you probably don't want to include a scene in which, after subduing a group of humans, a giant robot pees on one of them by way of compelling cooperation. And though it's played for laughs, like it or not, this is a real way the coarsening of our culture happens -- one mean-spirited movie scene played-for-laughs at a time. It's funny when it happens to a bad guy in the movies. It's not so funny when you're being mugged or car-jacked and the perpetrator decides he'll throw in an homage to the latest Transformers film and starts unzipping his fly. State Farm can replace your Lexus, but not your dignity. Spielberg oughta know better.
Did I mention the movie has Megan Fox?