Clang! Clang! Clang! Went the Shape-Shifting Robots With a Helpful Dose of Comedy to Boot

Rating: 6/10 (2 August 2007)

Director Michael Bay will never win any awards for subtlety with his industrial-strength, testosterone-heavy popcorn movies. His prevalent use of quick cuts and hand-held shots, compounded by car chases, explosions and other CGI-saturated effects, are all accounted for in this juvenile-oriented 2007 action picture, but I have to admit that there is a welcome sense of humor in the screenplay by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci that manages to bring this one a cut above Bay's previous endeavors like The Island. Humor is a smart approach in tackling potentially unfamiliar terrain such as Hasbro's Transformers franchise, which had its heyday in the 1980's, before much of the film's audience was born. Yet, at the same time, there is a need to remain true to the spirit of the original premise without changing it in order to pacify baby boomers who would not accept anything less than the myth. In meeting both those objectives, the film meets expectations as an intermittently entertaining summer film.
The convoluted story has to do with two warring factions of shape-changing robots - the heroic Autobots and the villainous Decepticons - who both depend on a monolithic entity known as the Cube for sustaining their races. Just how it does it is beyond my comprehension, as do most of the plot details having to do with the Transformers and their planet Cybertron. What make marginally more sense is the main storyline around an awkward, huckstering teenager named Sam Witwicky, who is the descendant of an explorer whose glasses hold the key to the Cube. Sam wants a car badly and gets a beat-up Camaro which naturally turns out to be an Autobot. He also wants Mikaela, a girl who seems way out of his league until her mechanical skills and checkered past come to the fore. While this boy-meets-car-and-girl story is simmering, there are other subplots involving an army unit in the Middle East battling the Decepticons, a computer hacker who frustrates the Secretary of Defense with her complex yet undeniable deductive reasoning, and a group of X-Files-type agents, led by an overbearing zealot, who try to take Sam and Mikaela into custody.
There doesn't seem to be great priority placed on resolving the various plot lines, except for the first one and only after twenty minutes of quick-action destruction held mostly in medium shots in an assumed attempt to exaggerate the parameters of the action. Oddly, the climax has more of a benumbing effect since it's difficult to tell the scope of the action with much of it feeling clunky and repetitive until the exhausting finish. Before that, many scenes come across as inexplicable, over-explained or just too drawn out to enjoy fully, for example, the comically clumsy Autobots hiding around Sam's parents' house. Emphasizing the derivative nature of Bay's approach here are snatches of film classics like The Terminator and especially King Kong used throughout, and the influence of executive producer Steven Spielberg can be felt in Sam's responsibility-driven storyline.
Bay and the screenwriters deserve credit for humanizing the robots just enough to make them compelling to the viewer, though honestly not enough to empathize that much with their fates. It's not for lack of trying, as for example, Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, provides stentorian fervor and palpable dignity to the role. The human performances are in line with a comic-book-style franchise. Shia LaBeouf has the most screen time as Sam. The young actor makes Sam a likable reluctant hero, though he's fairly limited beyond his constant look of amazement. The real scene stealers are John Turturro as the unctuous agent, Anthony Anderson as a squealing hacker and recent Tony winner Julie White as Sam's overprotective mother. Barely registering is Josh Duhamel as the heroic head of the army unit and Megan Fox in form-fitting wear as Mikaela. All in all, it's pretty clear that the movie defies logic and relies heavily on sensory overload to sustain itself. The unexpected comedy elements are what make it better than at least what I expected.