Never again!!!

Rating: 1/10 (11 August 2007)

After having been forced to watch "Pearl Harbor" a couple of years ago (and for my memory's sake I wish it was 50 years ago) I promised myself to never go see a Michael Bay movie again. However, a friend of mine tried to convince me that "Transformers" might be worth an attempt, based on the fact that a non-history related, action-packed comic-and-toy-franchise-adaption might be a fitting theme for a megalomaniac director like Bay. Even the critics who booed "Pearl Harbor" back then said that Bay had finally found his genre, and that "Transformers" was indeed an enjoyable popcorn movie. So my buddy and me went to the cinema.... and I painfully realized I should have stuck to my promise!!! I'm still looking for negative superlatives to describe the movie, because "awful", "horrible", "worst movie ever" and "complete waste of time and brain cells" just don't quite say it.
I don't know where to begin... well, let's start with the overall impression of the director's "efforts". I had the feeling of watching not an entire movie, but a line up of trailers from different genres. Bay was genre-hopping from infantile American Pie-like humor (pretty much every scene with Sam, his parents and the girl) to cheesy drama (when Bumblebee gets caught) and last but not least to horrifyingly pathetic gung ho heroism made in the U.S.A.! And it went back and forth all through the movie without the slightest attempt to get these connected in a bearable manner. Every single scene felt completely out of place due to the previous and following one. Screenplay and editing were virtually non-existent.
The characters (be it human or Transformer) were all totally mundane, archetypal in a horrible way and completely cliché-dominated. My heart bled when I saw John Turturro embarrassing himself with this joke of a character. But it's not the actors' fault that the characters came out so thin. Given the screenplay I would say that the Teletubbies would have been the most appropriate cast for both the protagonists and the villains.
The effects were top notch, yes, but nowadays that's not an achievement anymore, is it? Especially not if you can afford to hire the most expensive FX Company in the world. And still Bay manages to spoil the action by shooting it so fast, that it was almost impossible to see any details. Pretty much all the robot fights were one big blur on the screen - which is far away from what I call enjoyable special effects.
One last point of criticism before I come to my destructive conclusion for this flick: Subtlety! That's what Bay needs to learn (among a lot of other things)! Subtlety! You just can't go over the top for 140 minutes straight! Not even in an action-packed SF robot whatever movie. It's simply too much! So far every single Michael Bay movie I had to endure felt like a bad stimulus satiation. This isn't film-making, this is cheap grandstanding for big business.
Summary for "Transformers": The latest and saddest proof that talent is no longer of any value in blockbuster Hollywood. Not sure exactly how high the production costs were (probably once again the highest in Hollywood history so far) but as far as I am concerned every single dollar was wasted in this project. I can only advise you to keep the money and spare yourself the brain damage. I have definitely drawn my conclusion from this and will never watch a Michael Bay movie again.