| Transformers
(2007)
Hamster Rating: 3 pellets |
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STARRING: Shia LeBeouf [Sam], Megan
Fox [Mikaela], Josh Duhamel [Sgt. Lennox], Tyrese Gibson [Sgt. Epps],
Rachael Taylor [Maggie], John Voight [Defense Secretary Keller]
"More than meets the eye!"
Such is the tagline to Hasbro's immensely popular line of shape-changing robot toys which
spawned several tv shows, an animated feature film (featuring Orson Welles in his last film role),
and now this live-action, CGI-splosion of a movie. The line "more than meets the eye" referred, of
course, to the fact that although the toy looked like a car or a gun or a helicopter, with a few twists
and clicks it was suddenly a mighty robot. Well, in 2007, the twists and clicks are fantastically fluid
and complicated CGI creations, and the robots are indeed mighty. And for 80's-bred fanboys, that
will likely be enough to secure Transformers a decent box office. Beyond its nifty effects,
there really isn't much else to it.
Transformers is a summer blockbuster by-the-numbers, with loveable geek Sam
(LeBeouf) as its central protagonist, who goes to buy his very first car, and comes back with an alien
robot that is part of a benevolent faction of alien robots seeking a device called the Allspark, which
will bring life back to their dying world, or deliver Earth into the evil hands of all-around bad robot
Megatron. Along the way, Sam awkwardly woos the entirely
too-unbelievably-gorgeous-to-really-be-a-high-school-girl, Mikaela (Megan Fox), runs afoul of a
secret government organization and saves the day. You know, all the typical cliches. The
government employees are trigger-happy and smug, the women are all unaccountably sexy, the black
guys are wise-cracking comic relief, and the alien robots take turns spouting stilted dialogue at each
other whilst having epic wrestling matches in the middle of large, populated metropolises. All a bit
ho-hum, really.
The CGI work done by Industrial Light and Magic is amazing, and I'm sure if LeBeouf and Fox
could have actually seen what they were supposed to be acting against, their performances would
have been that much better. Instead, when Optimus Prime drops them into the middle of a
fantastic flashback that makes it appear as though the ground is cracking all around them, LeBeouf
and Fox appear only vaguely surprised by it. Admittedly, the story is so full of run-arounds and
robot smash-downs that there's hardly any time for the real actors to do much of anything.
There's also at least one subplot too many, especially since the story is never more than a
perfunctory excuse to get the robots battling. We frenetically skip from the deserts of Qatar to
Anytown, USA to Air Force One, leaving clusters of characters unattended for so long that you
practically forget about them. But since all of the characters are just slightly modified versions of
the same cliches that appear over and over again in these summer actioners, there's little motivation
to care about them, anyway.
That said, there's an appreciable amount of zippy dialogue spread amongst the human and
robot characters and the occasional dollop of broad humor to keep things from getting too dull. All
the same, it could've done with more of both, particularly when the robots are stuck with lines like:
"At the end of this day, one shall stand...and one shall fall!" The parts that work best are the
exchanges between Sam and the various other human characters, making me wish that the movie
had spent more time developing some of the relationships (another side-effect of the too-large cast
and overburdened plot).
Ultimately, there's just a bit too much action, and Michael Bay's directoral style of perpetually
moving cameras and tight close-ups render most of it into unintelligible mazes of flickering colors.
Which is a shame, given the incredible attention to detail that must have gone into designing the
look of the robots.
A serviceable popcorn flick, Transformers feels like a slapdash affair that, if not for
its famous and nostalgic subject matter, is hardly unique from any of the brainless Bruckheimer
camp products that have preceeded it. Clearly banking solely on what "meets the eye," it should
satisfy the inner 9-year-old boy in all of us...at least until the next big action film comes along.
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