Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 67

Michael Bay may just be the most successful panhandler in the history of time. He will not stop sweeping his camera, not even for a moment to read or revise the script. Transformers was a simple animated series, but at least it made sense and eventually ended. This adaptation does not make sense, though it undoubtedly will make more dollars than Gone With the Wind, which is where it should go.

It makes the mistakes of many modern summer tentpoles – it panders to a marketer’s idea of every possible market: There’s a bit for the kids, a part for the dads, a gear for the hardcore fans, and even a spare cog for the mothers who bother to see it. All those parts transform into a towering wreck of metal with too many stories and not enough story. Aliens invade; Some are friendly, some are not; War begins; An innocent boy and his girl are caught in the middle; great story on paper, but the only paper it was on was the poster.

The film barely gets off the ground with the action packed B-story of Tyrese Gibson’s platoon. An A.I. zombie helicopter, reported shot-down, goes rogue in the high desert and the world goes on high alert. The opening action is an accurate harbinger of the excellent CG and mediocre choreography to slightly vault the rest of the film. I couldn’t tell a propeller from a rotor from a credit sequence. And after anything transforms, I’m completely lost in the mech-melee mix. Good thing the inept government steps in to clear things up. Someone, Jar Jar Soundwave, hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe. So Jon Voight arrests some random hackers to help at anything but arresting the audience.

Meanwhile back in the 80s, a teen boy loves a girl and a car. Enter protagonist, finally. Shia LeBeouf shows up just in time to get his first auto, bought by his dad’s low-limit credit card, charged with a a high-level mysterious power – it’s a transformer. This A-story safely grounds the dead-spinning film, which should have started here and ended with the story of how the Transformers came to be and came to be on Earth. But Spielberg spread his thin veneer of mastery over the master copy by adding in a military B-story for the military B-story, a hacker-y C-story, and, of course, an archeological dig F-story that looks like a DVD bogus feature from National Treasure. And we’re left to transform the incompatible pieces of a film into something we want to like, which may explain why you do.

Somewhere in the mess of the movie, Shia gets the girl, Tyrese

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