TRANSFORMERS (Michael Bay, 2007) ***

Rating: 7/10 (6 September 2007)

Being familiar with the original cartoon series of the 1980s, I was interested in catching the Hollywood live action blockbuster version. Basically, this turns out to be a combination of THE TERMINATOR (1984), INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) and even BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001). As was to be expected for a modern day popcorn flick, teenagers are involved but, luckily, the two leads (despite their anonymity to the undersigned) were unusually affectingalthough, in the second half of the show, they too are eventually sidetracked by all the spectacle.
Surprisingly enough, the villainous Decepticons are severely underused and their leader Megatron himself doesn't appear until the last half-hour or so! In fact, the most notable of the evil machines is a new addition to the fold – a hacker robot who grunts and gesticulates like a Gremlin! Also unexpected is the film's comic highlight set in the hero's backyard which sees the benign Autobots attempting to hide from the latter's overly inquisitive parents.
For all the spectacular CGI-infested action sequences, the look of the machines themselves is rather cluttered – would we have been as impressed with the original King Kong if we couldn't see the mechanism at work? – and the fast and furious pace of the action sequences becomes numbing after a while: imagine the chariot race in BEN-HUR (1959) where the crucial antagonism between him and Messala is all but lost in the shuffle! Also, aren't we all tired by now to see every disaster to hit the planet nowadays being given the paranoid 9/11 spin – with the resulting affirmation of the ingenuity and superiority of the U.S. Defense system (even if they require the services of the world's top teenage hackers to crack the alien code)?
Anyway, this is not a film to break down and analyze but one to take your breath away with awesome special effects and, in this regards, it succeeds well enough; for what it's worth, the human cast, apart from the afore-mentioned teenage leads, includes Jon Voight as the Secretary of Defence and John Turturro as an oddball member of a mysterious government agency.