More than meets the Bay standards...

Rating: 7/10 (27 October 2007)

As anyone who knows me probably knows I am an avid and outspoken detractor of Michael Bay and all of his films. I've found them to be cheap exploitive and manipulative pieces of substandard film-making that appears to have garnered some attention due to his flashy style of directing. However, Transformers became one of the biggest movies of 2007 and, as such, I had to see the movie if only to have a merited opinion on the film. By the time the Autobots descended on Earth in the form of a meteor shower, one bit actor runs by the screen with a camera, yelling to it that it is "a hundred times better than Armageddon," I sat in the theater and wondered to myself if the actor knew how many volumes of honesty he was just speaking.
Transformers not only became the fun and exciting summer movie that I was waiting for all of 2007, but it proved to me that Michael Bay has it in him to make a movie that goes beyond exploitive and sociopathic tendencies, two underlying themes in all of his movies that I couldn't shake to the point where I couldn't enjoy them as passive fun. Here, the bitter angriness against the human race that is evident in all of his previous films has gone and we have a fun slice of juvenile entertainment that it seems that Bay has been waiting to make.
For anyone who grew up watching Transformers every Saturday morning, the plot needs no explanation. Autobot transformers battle Decepticon transformers on earth in a bid to protect humanity. However, this Transformers focuses less on the robotic characters than in the American government, a small band of army soldiers and one hyper-testosteroned yet socially inept teenager and his overly hot love interest, all of which sport some very strong and obvious spray on tans.
Sam Witwicky, played with youthful gusto by Shia LaBeouf, is given his first car, which happened to be a "robot in disguise" named Bumblebee, who was sent to protect Sam, who happens to be in possession of a map to find a key element for both sides of the transformers called the allspark. The autobots want to use the allspark to reignite their destroyed world while the decepticons want to use the device to create their own robotic army. Simple plot, not too hard to follow, but, hey, who needs to see existentialist character pieces in a movie about cars that become robots and fight each other? There are very cheesy moments and lines in the film, there are plot contrivances and there are some very over the top performances, but like I said earlier, this isn't a film that is meant to be scrutinized the way that a Scorcese or Bergman film was meant to be. So the best way to evaluate Transformers would be to judge the action and fun level. In both respects, the movie succeeds if only because it abandons the standard sociopathic Bay mentality and instead focuses on the entertainer that he has always strived to be. If I have a complaint with this film, it's that the camera needed to be pulled back more during some of the action sequences to get a better look at what was going on. Bay's style is very in your face, but there are points where I wanted to see more of the Transformer fights and get a chance to enjoy what I was watching.
And before I finish the review here, I have to give credit to the amazing visual effects that this film was able to accomplish. So seamless, on both the big and the small screen, where the effects where interactive machines would all of the sudden transform into the gigantic robots that they were. The very first time a machine transforms into another machine, the effect is so seamless that the movie shows the capabilities that computer effects have come.
Transformers is the fun summer film that hearkens back to a time when the blockbusters were entertaining and free spirited, much like Men in Black, Jurassic Park or The Mask. Not only that, but Michael Bay has also stood up to a very challenging task to me: making a movie that has actually made me excited to see his next film.