Michael Bay does it again

Rating: 3/10 (31 July 2007)

I was a huge Transformers fan as a child, so with the latest developments in CGI I was truly looking forward to this movie, until I realised that the man at the helm was Michael Bay. This is the man who unleashed Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and The Island upon an unsuspecting world, so I knew fear. I went into the cinema hoping that it would be good, but expecting it to be bad. In the end my expectations won and my hopes were shattered.
Firstly, the good. The action is mind-blowing, there are some set pieces that truly make you gasp. The transforming sequences are beautifully done, and the robots are the most life-like CGI characters up to date. When we look back at the history of CGI and live-action, this film will be one of the true innovators, and its technological achievements are worthy to be mentioned in the same sentence with the likes of Jurassic Park and LOTR. Whenever the Transformers are on screen, the movie becomes something else. Those scenes are precisely what a Transformers movie should be all about: robots beating the daylights out of each other.
However, the problem with this Transformers movie are the large chunks of time when the robots are not on screen. The acting is ludicrously bad, Bay manages to squeeze more emotion from Optimus Prime's little finger than from his entire human cast. John Turturro portrays the wacky black-ops operative, one of the many failed and feeble attempts at comic-relief, but he looks embarrassed by the script. Bernie Mac has become a movie cliché all on his own as the "funny black man", a cliché reprised poorly by Anthony Anderson, who is probably the worst ever hacker on screen. John Voight is clearly bored by playing yet another hapless authority figure. Oh yes, and we also get the "little Arab kid", Bay's scraping of the cliché barrel knows no boundaries.
This is a movie clinically tailored for the male teenager. The female cast has been hired just to look pretty (which they do, with the exception of the adequately embarrassed mum). I do not know where the producers hang out, but female hackers do not look like Rachael Taylor. And don't even get me started on racial stereotypes. Blacks eat a lot, white suburbians only care about their lawns, Hispanics are superstitious and go into Spanish rants all the time.
The dialogue is painful at times, and the supposedly comic scene where the protagonists look for the glasses while the Transformers wait outside has got to be one of the most contrived and ham-fisted scenes that I have had the displeasure of witnessing. I literally groaned at how completely parochial it all seemed. The world is threatened, yet we stand around talking about masturbation.
This movie is a clear spawn of the post-911 genre. The military are given a bumped-up heroic role, which had the same lame effect in the overall result as it did in War of the Worlds. We are hit over the head time and time again with America's military superiority, but the fact that the Transformers are vulnerable to conventional weaponry completely steals the thunder from the heroic Autobots, who end up being nothing but large support cast. This is the main flaw in an already flawed film. The climax could have been the same if you had erased the Autobots, just let the marines handle things. Oh yes, where were the Decepticons in all this? Yet another wasted opportunity at complexity.
This movie had a lot of potential, but unfortunately Bay and his ilk clearly do not think highly of their audience. They know what to give them, and seeing the comments in this board, they are always going to get a positive response regardless of the drivel they produce.