Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 37

Darkness. Optimus Prime’s voice (that of the immortal Peter Cullen) echoes through space as stars fade into view. For a second, for just a second, I think things are going to be ok.

Then I start listening to the words. “Autobots… Decepticons.” Good. “Devastating war that destroyed our whole civilisation.” Great. “Allspark Cube”. Grea… Hang on.

I’m looking at a huge cube, rather remeniscent of the Borg, floating through the void. Apparently, it has the power to create mechanical life. And guess – no – just GUESS, where it’s landed. As Prime melodramatically announces, “a tiny planet, called… EARTH.”

But I’m willing to accept all this. It’s ok for blockbuster adaptations to mess with the canon a bit. But only if it’s done well. And in this movie, it really isn’t.

Now we’re in Qatar. Patriotic, heroic American soldiers are on duty in the Middle Eastern desert, clearly not unnecessarily referencing in any way any current affairs. But fine, I say, I’ll let them off, because suddenly the first Decepticon arrives in the form of an unmanned helicopter. Cue brilliant CG battle between giant stompy robot with energy weapons and the desperate soldiers.

But that’s what’s always so painful about these movie adaptations: they’re so damn pretty. Industrial Light and Magic have outdone themselves with the animation in Transformers, but it’s the WAY it’s done that bothers me.

Optimus Prime doesn’t NEED fiery decals to make him cool. Yes, he transforms into a truck cab. But he’s still cool: he’s Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. In the original, Bumblebee is a VW Bug, not a souped-up Camaro. And their FACES. They look like freaking robot gorillas. And where’s Prime’s face mask? He wears it about three times in the whole film. To console myself I took to putting my hands in front of my face, pretending to wear it myself.

But let’s get back to the story. Basically the whole plot is formed around a tenuous link to eBay, with Megatron having crashed into the Arctic hundreds of years ago and been frozen, except for a brief moment of accidentally shooting a map to the Allspark Cube onto old explorer Witwicky’s glasses (does he often do this, we are forced to wonder?), which are later being sold on the Internet by Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky. You can almost imagine the moment in the scriptwriting session when they thought up this idea:

“Hey, we could reference eBay!”

“Cool! Because, you know, people use that in real life!”

“Yeah, but this would be in