Mixed feelings

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2007)

I finally got to see this after years of following the creation of it from the initial rumors to the announcement of Bay as director and so on. I was a very big Transformers fan in the 80s, and I'd consider playing with the toys to be a big part of my childhood. They were the last major toys I played with before puberty kicked in, so they have lingered as my favorites from back then.
My feelings about the movie are mixed. I'll start with the good (which is always shorter because it's less interesting).
It was the best Michael Bay movie I've seen. Granted, I've pretty much disliked everything else I've seen from him and I haven't seen everything. Armageddon remains the worst big-budget movie I've ever seen. But Transformers was a step up for Bay. The special effects were awesome and believable, and it was very cool to see the Transformers brought to life on screen. It's funny, I can remember saying after seeing Jurassic Park way back when digital effects were coming into their own that maybe they could make a live action Transformers, and lo and behold, here it is. The movie is visually arresting, and there are a couple of strong performances from Shia LeBouf and John Turturro. There's some humor and a good sense of fun with it.
Now the negatives.
For one, the robots didn't feel as much like individual characters as they did on the old cartoon. Their faces didn't look as much like faces, which is part of it. But they also looked too similar. The originals all looked quite a bit different. In robot form, they retained more of the look of the vehicles and other items they became. In the cartoon, you could see emotion on their faces and hear it in their voices. In the movie they were more like true robots. There also was no real portrayal of the relationships between the transformers. There was a bit of differentiation when the Autobots were introduced, but it wasn't too much. The Decepticons still all pretty much seemed the same.
There were some regular Michael Bayisms that I didn't like either. Heroes are too heroic and bad guys are too bad, especially for a PG-13 movie. Granted, that's how it was in the source material initially, but over time, the Transformers cartoon became more nuanced, with characters rethinking their positions and switching sides and issues of insanity in Decepticon leadership making some Decepticons question what they were doing. The show became more sophisticated as it went. Perhaps it is understandable that the sophistication level dropped, but I had hoped the PG-13 rating would mean more adult themes. No, just a few more curse words.
Another Michael Bayism I dislike is the glorification of violence. Now, I don't mind violent movies, but I don't like it when movies put a nice sheen on violence. If you're going to show violence, you should show its results. If you are going to show robots shooting up streets and crashing through buildings, you need to show some bodies. The original cartoon had most of its action happening in very isolated areas. The movie had a huge fight sequence in a major city and robots flying through buildings where it was actually shown that there were people working inside. A lot of people have a problem with violence in films. I have a problem not with violence but with a dishonest portrayal of it that hides its negative results.
I also thought there were some lazy stretches of believability. The government trying to cover up what happened in the end by burying the bodies at sea was stupid because obviously people would know, seeing as how a city got ripped apart and there had to have been reporters capturing it. Also, the military leadership was way too honest with the public, with the Secretary of Defense telling people on air that they had no idea what had attacked them in the desert and all that.
Yet another Michael Bayism is to depict military and political officials as simplistic, honest men who are purely heroic. Now, I think the portrayal of the soldiers themselves was actually pretty good, but the Sec Def is much more of a political position and I thought the character was basically too honest and straightforward.
I wasn't too bothered by the physical differences between the original versions and new versions of the vehicle forms of the Transformers. The change in Bumblebee's car form worked for the movie and the old versions were very 1980s anyway. How can you make a movie now where all the vehicles look like they're from the 1980s? However, I didn't like that they changed the basic nature of some of the characters. Bonecrusher and Devastator were two separate characters. In the original, Devastator was formed by combining five robots into one, and one of them was Bonecrusher. It is also a sin that Megatron turns into a plane and not some kind of big ol' gun. He didn't look nearly enough like the original Megatron to me.
Okay, I guess I've put enough effort into reviewing what was essentially a silly summer popcorn movie. It's just that it was a big part of my childhood, so I had a lot to say.