A true adaptation

Rating: 8/10 (3 July 2007)

Saw it last night at 9:15. Almost found myself buying Transformers toys this afternoon, so the marketing trick is working...
Okay, I will go in reverse usual order and do the Good before the Bad.
The Good: This is a proper Transformers movie. Reagan-era "pure Good versus pure Evil." Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime - he IS Optimus Prime.
I was ten years old when the Transformers came into existence, so I was at the precise center of the target audience those toys and cartoons and comic books were being marketed to. I had it all - and I can tell you that the movie gives you an authentic Transformers experience. They ARE the Transformers, Autobots and Decepticons, precisely the way you remember them, just 23 years later.
The true Transformers mythos is rather faithfully-reproduced, with changes made for expediency's sake. There's no time for the retelling of the asteroid belt that threatened Cybertron or the crashing of the Ark four million years ago, but the basic story remains unchanged nonetheless.
The effects are amazing. They made the transformation sequences *believable.* I had heard tale of certain mass-to-space calculations they had made to determine the sizes of the Transformers in robot mode, and it looks like they really did an excellent job in figuring that out.
The pacing was pretty good. It didn't feel like a 143 minute movie.
Now, the Bad: This was one of the most racist movies I have seen in a long, long time. The Creole guy who eats alligator tails and who talks about his grandmother having "the sight." The guy who gets yelled at twice for speaking Spanish. The Indian person on the customer service line. The Black Special Ops soldier who gets yelled at for not being able to keep up with acronyms (which, in the book, is followed by said Special Ops soldier throwing back all the acronyms he has to learn as a Spec Ops soldier, which is noticeably edited out in the movie). The Autobot who dies is the "black" Autobot. I am bringing pen and paper to a viewing so that I can catalog all the incidents.
It left me with the feeling that had I watched this movie with my 9 year old I would have immediately needed to deconstruct all this so that my son realized the sloppy writing being utilized. Stuff like this left me with the distinct feeling that this movie could have been SO much better had it not suffered from one thing: Michael Bay.
Michael Bay is a slipshod, shallow, stuck-in-his-adolescence arrogant schmuck who doesn't deserve to direct another film. Unfortunately, they have two more Transformers pics in the works and I cannot imagine that he will pass up the paycheck.
He gave Optimus Prime a mouth because he just "wanted to change things." I found that somewhat offensive, but that's my childhood-fan purism talking...
The film is *very* conservative. There's the aforementioned language comment, for one. For another, the military is terribly-glorified. When the Secretary of Defense (cast in the mold of a true warrior, hilariously-enough considering old Rummy who just left the position) announces that "losing isn't an option for these guys," in reference to the Special Ops soldiers that become integral to the plot, you might want to refer him to some of the casualties in Iraq. There are times when "Transformers" is a virtual recruitment tool. "Come look at all the cool toys you can learn to play with!" You never see the results of the Transformers' war on Earth in terms of the human casualties they inflict, other than one scene in which a Spec Ops soldier is impaled, full-screen, by Skorpinok and another in which Megatron flicks away a human like an insect.
Other than that, the Autobots and Decepticons fight their way through cities and highways without any sign of the casualties they are causing. The violence is incredibly antiseptic. At one point, when Megatron was crashing through a building and you see it in slow-motion from a side angle, I turned to my friend and said "A WHOLE lot of people are dying right now," and we had a good laugh about it.
This, again, brings us back to the Transformers as a Reagan-era, simplified morality play. What the Transformers *are* hasn't changed in 23 years one whit, which makes Bay's horrific lack of style perfectly suited to this film, interestingly enough. So, while the movie would have been so much better without him, he isn't able to screw up Transformers properly because it fits into his shallow style so well.
I suppose you would say that Bay didn't make a good movie in as much as he was handed material that even *he* couldn't flub; and having Spielberg as the Exec Producer surely helped to keep the ship sailing on a smooth course more than once.
I'd give the movie a B, and that's strongly influenced by my tilt towards the subject material. Shia LeBouf does give a great performance, but I honestly cared about him and the other humans infinitely-less than I did Bumblebee. I actually found Bumblebee to be the ONLY sympathetic character in the entire film.
This is a movie for 9 to 14 year olds, and it suffers for it. I suppose I shouldn't have expected them to make the film for my generation, even though we ARE the original Transformers fans, but they have to sell all those new toys and video games SOMEhow...
I'll see it two more times purely for the spectacle of the Transformers, but by my third viewing I am going to be pretty bored with the nigh-superfluous human characters.