Quite a lot less than meets the eye, actually...

Rating: 2/10 (31 October 2007)

It seems Transformers splits viewers firmly down the middle, with people either denouncing it as a lot of crap or saying they loved it. I do not denounce people because they have an opinion, not unless they want to tell me I am diseased and incapable because I was born different to the expected norm anyway, but this... film... goes beyond the limit of bad writing. Hence, when a defender of this film tells me that the sky is blue, I will ask someone else for their opinion. You see, I was a hyperlexic child in 1986 (that means I had a wider vocabulary when I was in elementary school than most people have when they enter tertiary education). Hence, I not only enjoyed The Transformers, the real Transformers, I could have explained to you in very lucid terms why the physics of their abilities are not only impossible but, in light of feasibility on a planet that is not blessed with a literally infinite power source, completely ridiculous. Why do I say all that? It is very simple. This film does not just insult my intelligence, it assumes that I am like my onetime elementary school teachers and have none.
Like all the truly bad films, there are moments when you start to just care about some of the characters. The soldiers who first meet one of the titular robots are likable, genuinely interesting guys. The teenagers that the film spends the majority of its time following, on the other hand, are the most insipid and annoying pieces of human filth it has been my displeasure to watch. In contrast to the Spike, Chip, or Sparkplug that gave the audience an element to relate to in the real Transformers, the Sam, Mikaela, and Maggie that pollute this abortion of an adaptation slow down the interest factor to a halt. It is one thing to make a film about a war between disparate factions of intelligent robots uninteresting. It is another altogether to make the human factor so monotonous and cliché that even the moments of interaction between people are boring. The "oh my god I do not know how to talk to another human being because it is feminine" act is so 1950s, guys.
Adding to the misery are the action sequences. Yes, the parts of the film that are meant to give relief from the monotony of the dialogue or the who-cares tepidness of the human characters actually bring the most pain. This is because director Michael Bay, like all directors who do not know how to make an action film interesting when all else has failed, resorts to the tried and tired method of making sure the audience cannot see what the hell is going on. Michael Bay, if you are out there and can read this, I promise you that if we ever meet, I am going to make you feel as dazed and nauseous as your piece of crap film has made me. I will sign a contract to do so in blood if you want commitment. Bay should really have trusted his original instinct, as he has made nothing more than a stupid toy film. Put simply, I did not just hate this film. I turned it off feeling like Bay had just shaken his ding-dong at me for two hours.
And what of the characters we were bracing ourselves to see on film? Well, Bumblebee is the one we get to see first, so let us deal with him. Put simply, Bumblebee's function in the real Transformers was to demonstrate that size alone does not make a person worthy. In spite of being not much bigger than your average Human, he often steered his fellow Autobots out of danger when it was really needed. Or rescued the human element. Take your pick. But in Michael Bay's conception of the world, everyone who is worth anything is at least 6'7" and weighs 250 pounds, minimum. Do not try telling him Albert Einstein was a mere 5'9", it will fall on deaf ears. And it gets worse from there. The real Optimus Prime was a leader because of several things. One, he was as intelligent as he was large (that's right, Michael, intelligence counts for A LOT in battle). Two, he was unafraid to serve the greater good, even if it came at the cost of his own life. Three, he led by example. Four, he led by example. Five, he led by example. Six, well, you get the idea.
When you add all these things together, you find they contradict the very nature of the robots Michael Bay presents to us and asks us to believe are the Transformers. Optimus Prime in this film cannot even take one of his human wards to retrieve a vital element of their mission without crushing major backyard ornaments and, along with his fellow Autobots, making enough noise to alert an entire city block to their presence. Oh, and by the way, Jazz had class. He was not a twenty foot tall expression of bling-bling culture. Ugh, being that I could read Tolkien when Darius McCrary was probably failing elementary school English, his presence in this film is an insult to everything the original series was about. It is one thing to have characters who are, to quote George Clooney, dumber than a bag of hammers. This film goes a lot further This film assumes that its audience is made up entirely of four year olds who have never read a cereal packet. In so doing, it takes everything that such writers as Dennis O'Neil and Bob Budiansky created and perverts it.
Transformers as directed by Michael Bay is a two out of ten film in every sense. Avoid.