Uncle Sam Wants You (to See This Movie)

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2007)

I was actually slightly motion sick after leaving this film, so my final impression of it is somewhat marred by that, but overall this was dumb summer fun at its best. I was the right age for the transformer toys, but I never really got into them. However, having played with them is not a prerequisite for enjoying the film.
These kind of movies crack me up. They are so obvious in their intentions to traffic in the gut emotions of an audience not used to thinking very critically about what they are watching. This film, like most of Michael Bay's films, is a gussied up military recruitment ad, the kind where all of the soldiers in it are muscled and oily, and where they do a lot of walking toward the camera in emphatic slow motion. There are girls in the film (two of them, to be exact), but they're basically just guys with breasts and nice legs. The government is to be feared and distrusted, because they keep secrets from the American people (like the fact that the Hoover Dam was really built as a facade to hide alien robots and their belongings), while the military is heroic and manly. To make itself feel relevant, the film even throws in some action scenes set in the Middle East.
It was refreshing, though, that for once all of the chest-thumping is not reserved solely for the United States, but rather for the human race in general. The message in "Transformers," other than that geeky teenagers have the stuff soldiers are made of, is that the human race isn't so bad after all, even if we have a lot to learn.
Grade: A-