Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 44

BIG ROBOTS; LITTLE CHANGE!

TRANSFORMERS

(12A, general release)

*

I know I’m not going to be very popular for saying this (even if it does mean that I’ll have to pay 8.50 euro the next time I go to the cinemathanks Mags!) but I was distinctly unimpressed & un-entertained by yet this modern day reincarnation of the rubix-cube like robotic cars & their adventures. Now before you get on my case let me say this: I had got caught up in the whole hype surrounding the Transformers and I was very much looking forward to what I hoped would be one of the films of the summer. As a result I’d made a real effort to get into the film & gave it every chance to entertain but it just didn’t work.

Sam Witwicky (Shia Lebouf) is the central character in this testosterone-fuelled Michael Bay film. He’s a typically awkward; geeky 11th grader who really wants the car and the girl. He succeeds in part one of this mission when his father takes him along to a garage to buy him a car for his graduation. The car he chooses or should I say that “chooses him” is a strange; beat up yellow camero which lot owner Bobby Bolivia (Bernie Mack) hasn’t seen before. Initially however, phase 2 of that mission doesn’t really go to plan when in Sam’s attempt to impress cool girl Mikaela (Megan Fox), the car starts randomly playing appropriate songs such as “Sexual Healing” & “Baby Come Back”. Yikes, talk about awkward moments. To cap it all off, the car drives away one night & Sam tracks it down to a place where the car has transformed into a giant robot communicating with a UFO via a light beam!

Meanwhile, over in Qatar, U.S. Soldiers have just been attacked by a helicopter that manages to morph itself into one vicious robot, annihilating everything in its sight while yet another one downloads top-secret files from the countries computers. And so in steps (does it remind you of Donald Rumsfield), Secretary of Defense John Keller (Jon Voigt) to call an emergency conference of experts to analyze the hidden data. However while all this is happening, one of the smaller robots manages to hack into the computer of Air-Force One.

The malevolent robots called the Decepticons are on a mission of their own and that is to reclaim the all-powerful cube: The Allspark. In doing so they (along with the good robots: the Autobots) discover that the evil Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving) crashed