Talking of Transformers, try transforming all that money into something productive or half decent for a change.

Rating: 4/10 (1 April 2009)

It seems sadly ironic that the film that kicked this blockbuster 'movement' off in the 1970s was based on a book, that film being Jaws. Since then we've had further blockbusters based on books; blockbusters based on comic books; blockbusters based on television programmes right up to the debacle that is the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy which was based on a theme park ride. Now, it seems, and with the imminent release of a 'G.I. Joe' film and a Transformers sequel, we have a new order: films based on action figures – is that the sound of a barrel base being scraped, I hear? It is additionally sad when a viewer must loose count of the product placement a film contains and must feel distinctly bored by impressive enough computer generated graphics, quite literally flying all over the place in slow motion and slamming each other into buildings and highways, but with which very little else is.
In short, Transformers is a pretty terrible film; a film that sets up a scenario, provides us a MacGuffin, introduces relatively limp characters and feeds us bits and pieces of where it's going to go in relation to its story before just descending into near self-parody. I was ready for the film to end after about an hour and ten, but then I wouldn't have got to see Jon Voight very briefly break into a little sprint then later fire an assault shotgun at the latest in computer graphic software. I also wouldn't have got to see the final half an hour of out and out action in which there is a cut every other nano-second and characters, whom up to that point were only capable of realistic enough actions, get to slide off motorcycles under giant robots thus destroying them. I wouldn't have got to see another giant robot leaping over a kneeling girl in slow motion as we get acquainted with what her tonsils look like - then, when all the action has come to an end, there is a really, really God-awful payoff.
The film takes time to set up young adult Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf), who is living with his parents, goes to high school and desperately wants a car because he thinks it will attract the attention of girls. Speaking of girls, there is a love interest in Mikaela Banes (Fox). Trouble is, we don't like Sam initially. His great-grandfather was an English explorer who, along with his crew in the Antartic, has that oddly familiar cockney English accent most American movies possess English characters with. How does Sam honour him? By selling the equipment and spectacles worn by is great-grandfather when he was struck down amidst the ice over a hundred years ago. Wouldn't you know it, he was finished off by Megatron – the leader of the 'evil' Transformers whom crash landed on Earth centuries ago.
LaBeouf plays him with a sense of urgency, a neurotic style which, against all odds, actually works when the attempted acquisition of the spectacles has undergone on the Transformers' behalf. They need it because it tells them where something called the All Spark is located, and that is what the two robotic races want most. But if LaBeouf is passable, then the actress known as Megan Fox is the opposite. She is so magisterially awful that she defies words. The first time she even sees a Tranformer in the form of Bumblebee (aka LaBeouf's car that he purchases), she doesn't even react to it and carries the same, gormless look on her face throughout – she pouts her way through the film, delivering bad dialogue badly and just generally annoys you with her blank expressions.
When we first see her, she leans over a car engine, slightly angelic via the music and gleam that radiates off her body she; is the very definition of objectification. The film is really nothing more than a teenage fantasy to do with getting caught in the middle of these two warring superpowers, and in this retrospect, it's nothing much more than Alien vs. Predator but with a love interest – both film's catalysts even took place many decades ago in the snow and ice. How can a film that cost so much and that has so much going on, visually, be so damn uninteresting? It doesn't want to make a commentary on how the new order to do with fear of North Korea and China is in place whenever an 'attack' on U.S. forces occurs; it's not bothered about robots as pieces of modernity and how they can be used well but also misused: it's all about the attractive, faceless female and the big explosions and the awe of it all. This was $150,000,000 spent on absolutely nothing.