TRANSFORMERS and TRANSFORMERS:  THE MOVIE ** (out of ****)
TRANSFORMERS Starring Shia Labeouf, Megan Fox, Tyrese Gibson, Peter Cullen, and Jon Voight Directed by Michael Bay & written by John Rogers, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman 2007 144 min PG13		TRANSFORMERS:  THE MOVIE Starring Peter Cullen, Robert Stack, and Leonard Nimoy Directed by Nelson Shin & written by Ron Friedman 1986 84 min  PG
Here are some of the most amusing criticisms I’ve found leveled at the new “Transformers” movie: “Cinematography so glossy one fears the actors and sets will slide right off the screen.” (www.SlantMagazine.com) “The same old thing, nicely coated with a nostalgia that might only go back a few dozen years.  It’s very strange, these people barely out of their twenties waxing poetic about the beloved toys of their youth, as if the Reagan era could only be recaptured by examining sepia-tone photographs and dusty archives.”  (www.RuthlessReviews.com) “If Michael Bay loves the military so much, why doesn’t he just marry it?”  (www.SlantMagazine.com) So on the Fourth of July my friends went to see the new “Transformers” live-action extravaganza.  Afterwards we met for hot dogs and hamburgers, as is custom.  Still aglow with robot-induced excitement, they put in the DVD for the old “Transformers” animated movie from 1986.  I protested, fearing that “you can’t go back!” but was voted down. Did I have Transformers toys when I was young?  Heavily-armed robots that change into cars, airplanes, stereos, guns, spaceships, boats, trains, cassette tapes, buildings, microscopes, and, sometimes, other robots – of course I had Transformers.  Their backstory has them crash-landing on Earth from the all-metal, all-robot planet Cybertron.  The good robots fight the evil robots and mankind is caught in the middle.  Good stuff.  Ripe for, well, something. Did I watch the cartoon (1984-7) based on the toys?  Of course I did.  Have I watched it again recently?  I think we watched a couple minutes off someone’s harddrive.  Was it awful?  You bet – violence, noise, bad puns, washed-out colors, and alien robots that act precisely, 100% human.  In a stunning lack of imagination, they are less inhuman than the flesh populations of “The New World,” “Blood Meridian,” or any given Brian De Palma weird-fest.  The cartoon’s one claim to genius is the sound that the Transformers make when changing from robots into whatever – any kid could make it, and all the other kids knew what it meant. My wife fell asleep a couple times during the 84 minutes of the old “Transformers” movie.  When asked her opinion of the film, she said “they went different places and fought things.”  Pretty much sums it up.  She forgot to mention how the fights are set to some of the worst songs by ‘80s hair bands – I mean, aggressively bad songs, songs actively pursuing badness and cheese from every angle possible.  We have “Transformers:  The Movie” to thank for the song “(You’ve Got) The Touch,” which PT Anderson brilliantly resurrected for pornstar Dirk Diggler to sing in “Boogie Nights.” The main threads of “The Movie” include a change of command for the good robots and a Faustian bargain made between the leader of the evil robots and a planet-sized robot that eats other planets.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and “The Movie” starts off with a pretty kick-ass sequence in which the planet-robot eats a robot planet.  And the sequence in which the leader of the good robots comes flying in, temporarily invisible by a lens flare off the sun, mowing down his enemies, is pretty cool too.  I love lens flares in animated movies.  Then old toys are killed off to be replaced by new toys we have to nag our parents to buy. “The Movie” also scores points for being released theatrically while still having obvious commercial breaks.  There may not be actual commercials (I mean, “The Movie” IS a commercial), but “The Movie” fades-to-black periodically, then fades-up-from-black with a recap of what just happened.  It’s pretty clear that time was allotted for Cap’n Crunch and Ronald McDonald. So the time came for the wife and me to check out the new “Transformers,” from that pillar of hackdom, director Michael Bay.  Jerry Bruckheimer is not attached as producer (although he might as well be, his style is so evident), even though he produced Bay’s “Armageddon,” “The Rock,” “Pearl Harbor,” and “Bad Boys II.”  That role is filled, stunningly, by no less than Steven Spielberg!  We watched “Transformers” properly, not waiting for DVD, but catching it on two-for-one night at the $1.50 theater.  I was hoping for a new breed of awfulness, awful in ways I never thought possible.  Yet what we get is just another Bay picture:  loud, long, dumb, pandering, confused, and insincere.  The pace of “Transformers” is frantic, yet takes forever to get anywhere and is plain boring for stretches.  It takes an hour to establish what the Transformers are (in other words, to summarize the preview), then the movie immediately expects us to be familiar with the 24-year-old cartoon characters. “Transformers” follows the battle between the good robots and the bad ones, seen mostly through the eyes of a teenage boy and the insanely hot girl he’s trying to woo.  There are other threads, in which the US Army comes in contact with the first of the evil robots, and the boy has to help out the first of the good robots, and Jon Voight’s Secretary of Defense gets to use a shotgun.  The boy is played by Shia LaBoeuf, who does pretty well for himself, considering he has to narrate so much of what he’s doing while he’s doing it.
Left-leaning critics have perhaps read too much into Bay’s treatment of the military and the police.  Certainly Bay, like any boy, is fascinated with the military’s ability to blow shit up real good.  But if it were truly the military that obsessed him, and not their toys, then wouldn’t he be obsessed with (mindless?) devotion to duty, to obeying orders, to “ours is not to reason why”?  Instead, he presents his “street cred” cops and soldiers as continually burdened with commanders and authority figures who “just don’t get it!”  Disobeying orders is their bread-and-butter.  Bay’s cops and soldiers follow the classic paradigm of the action hero:  breaking the letter of the law and disobeying authority in order to follow the spirit of the law and dispensing the justice their immediate superiors are preventing them from doing. There are minor offenses aplenty – stupid dialogue, blurry fights, indistinguishable robots, patriotism with all the depth and sincerity of a truck commercial, artless compositions and cutting – but what’s it about Bruckheimer / Bay films that makes them truly bad?  Is it just noise?  Is it just the frantic pacing, cutting, delivery?  Is it the constantly mobile cameras and shimmering cinematography that exist solely so that we’re never fooled, even for an instant, that we’re watching a movie?  Their runtime is absurd; except for “National Treasure,” it seems Bruckheimer’s last half-dozen movies have all rambled well past the two-hour mark.  Is it the abrupt tonal shifts, from gravity to tediously unfunny sequences in which the boy tries to keep the good robots from crushing his parents’ flowerbed?  Say what you will about “Pearl Harbor” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but they at least have consistent tones, one ridiculously profound, the other ultimately comic. I reached this same impasse with “Bad Boys II.”  Bay and Bruckheimer have created a style that is, well, singular.  It’s just not for me. Finished Monday, December 10, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Movie