Not more than meets the eye

Rating: 4/10 (9 July 2007)

I was an unabashed fan of the Transformers in my youth during the 1980s. It competed with two other major toy franchises (G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe) for my attention and my parent's money, especially at Christmas time. I watched the animated series, went to see the animated movie twice in the theater in the summer of '86 and read the comic books. Of course, as time passed, other things consumed my interest over the Transformers, but I still feel a strong pull of nostalgia for that franchise. Now, two decades after the peak of the Transformers phenomenon, director Michael Bay has brought the Transformers back to the big screen with a live-action adaptation of the material, and as much as my nostalgia is piqued by this film, upon watching the final product, instead of mining gold, Bay, along with screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have managed to only produce a ho-hum affair, living up to the Shakespeare line: Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Transformers opens in Iraq, where a helicopter lands at a military base and proceeds to lay waste to it, transforming into a giant robot, and attempting to hack the computers. The narrative then moves to America, where high school student Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is purchasing his first car, which turns out to be a Camaro that is eerily insistent that Sam buy it. Upon getting it home, it drives itself off and Sam chases it, meeting up with a classmate, Mikaela (Megan Fox), and they find themselves caught in the middle of an interstellar war between two groups of sentient robots from another planet, the good ones named Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) , the evil ones Decepticons, led by Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving), who have the ability of camouflaging themselves as vehicles and electronic equipment. Both factions are in search of a cube named the All Spark that can bring life to otherwise inanimate technological objects; the Autobots want to destroy it before the Decepticons can use it to build an army to conquer the Universe (yes, a character actually specifies Universe in one scene).
Transformers has a number of problems, but it's two principal ones are a padded running length and a lack of any genuine excitement. Much like the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Transformers is too long for the material it has to work with. After the opening battle scene in Iraq, the film runs a good hour plus before anything else of tremendous interest occurs. Most of the scenes in the middle feature Sam getting his car, hitting on Mikaela, and a subplot involving young analysts at the Pentagon trying to decipher a signal detected during the Qatar attack that will hopefully lead to an answer as to what happened at the base. There is some light comedy sprinkled into these scenes, but nothing compelling that hasn't been done before and you find yourself wondering when the giant robots the trailers promised are going to show up.
Finally, the Transformers make an appearance, at which point the film showcases its most significant asset, the rather impressive computer animation of the Transformers. While the quality does vacillate a bit (many of the close-ups of the Transformers look fairly obviously computer generated), the majority of the imagery is well integrated into the real material for a reasonably seamless result. The problem, however, is that the Transformers are not developed at all as characters. Optimus Prime has a significant amount of dialogue, and Bumblebee, the Camaro, has some draw to him, but for the most part, they are just eye-candy. The Decepticons fare much worse, with no sense of menace, no danger to them, failing to cause us to hate them as villains. We don't care about the Transformers or their plight and aside from the fact that I played with them as a child, and therefore recognize the names, you can barely tell one apart from the other in most scenes.
The culmination of all this is that none of the action sequences at the end of the film have any weight to them. There is pyrotechnics galore, to be sure, but none of it matters a bit. It is just scene after scene of explosions and generic, non-descript robots tussling with each other for no real purpose. We don't care if one wins or the other loses and we don't care about the majority of the human characters caught in the middle either (I couldn't give you the names of the characters portrayed by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson from memory even if I tried). A few shots here and there have some kinetic kick to them, but that is about it.
Shia LeBeouf carries the role of Sam fairly well and should prove to have a decent career ahead of him, but he can't manage to elevate the role above the generic part that has been created. Megan Fox is certainly very attractive, but her character has even less development than Sam and proves to just be one more visual attraction in a film swirling with pretty images. Jon Voight is mostly here to collect a paycheck, Anthony Anderson shows up for a few scenes to do a variation on his usual schtick (which is funny at times), and then there is John Turturro. Portraying a government agent, Turturro must have been told he was starring in a parody film and turns in an over the top performance that you can't even begin to take seriously. He is amusing, but it is just one more hit at giving any depth to this film.
While some may disagree, I believe there is the possibility of a good film somewhere in this material, but Michael Bay was unable to recognize it and build one. Instead, we are left with this loud, overlong, underwhelming film that is definitely not more than meets the eye.