Movie Review: Transformers

I really had little interest in seeing Transformers. In fact I had none at all until I heard reviews that said it was good, if mindless, fun and had a really great action sequence at the end. Yesterday at various times I almost saw Knocked Up, Hairspray and Paris Je T'aime, but in the end, I saw Transformers, in part because I had a free ticket to use. This was my favorite Michael Bay film. Yes I hate the others. The reviews are correct that it's pretty fun and a half hour too long but the last sequence was perhaps my least favorite of the film.

Transformers are alien sentient robots in two groups. Autobots are good, Decepticons are bad. They can reshape themselves and disguise themselves as vehicles. Long ago, Megatron the leader of the Decepticons, came to earth but froze in the artic ice. He was found in the 1930s but an expedition and now the grandson of the leader of that expedition wants his first car. Nice transition there huh? Actually it's kinda fun. It's a contrived plot to setup a "boy and his robot" story. Sam Witwicky ends up buying a beat up yellow Camero that is in fact the autobot Bumblebee who is his protector. They want his grandfather's eyeglasses which have imprinted on them the location of the cube which is their power source. Sam put the glasses up for auction on eBay.

Meanwhile, Decepticons are fighting the miltary and trying to invade government computers to find the cube. There's a desert battle between an 8 man army unit and a scorpion-like robot that's really good. There's another one with a large robot at an army base. It's shot mostly from a human's point of view and really expresses that these things are big and way out of our league. Tanks and planes blow up real good and soldiers run while firing uselessly at the robot.

The movie breaks up this action well with stories of Sam and his new car and trying to win over Mikaela, the hot girl who only goes for jocks who also happens to be a wiz at engine repair and has a secret. When the Autobots reveal themselves to Sam and Mikaela it's pretty fun, but a scene where giant robots hide from his parents in their backyard went on too long and it went from amusing to annoying. There are a surprising number of other side characters the film follows including some soldiers, signal analysts trying to decipher a sound and a hacker kid who does next to nothing.

The plot gets progressively dumber as secret and inept government agencies are uncovered. The eyeglasses somehow have encoded in them not the original location of the cube but the current one. Also when you have a power failure and all your systems are down, you don't have the info to know it's a global phenomenon.

And then there's that final battle. Lots of good stuff happened, if only we could have seen it. Again this is mostly shown from the point of view of human participants and bystanders, so cars are thrown toward the camera a lot and robots go crashing. And there were too many closeups. Bay has to figure out how to use medium shots and allow you to see the characters particularly for the Optimus Prime vs Megatron battle. And it didn't help that the robots were always frenetically shifting. I couldn't tell the Decepticons apart and don't have any idea how many were killed. The CG animators had their debris filters set on high. And the score is taken from Terminator 2.

There are some funny bits. A Decepticon disguised as a police car says "To Punish and Enslave" on it's side. I also know how some of the writing process went. "Hey, Taco Bell is a sponser, give the boy a chihuahua and work in a Taco Bell line." "Ahhh, ok. Hey let's give the dog a cast on one of its legs."

Shia LaBeouf actually does a good job as Sam Witwicky. We want to like him. The rest of the cast is passable, given what they're asked to do. The robots are pretty well done and the destruction is on the right scale. If only the camerawork and editing were saner and the plot didn't give out at the end. Transformers was much better than I expected but I'm glad I got in free.