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dir: Michael Bay
Smart Robots. Dumb Humans
It is easy to hate Michael Bay, and especially to hate his movies. They are the apotheosis of mindless action raised to the status of pure content-free escapist claptrap that steals souls whilst it damages minds with its spastic imagery and brutal soundtracks. And Michael Bay himself is the grinning face of Death, seducing us with worm-filled decaying excrement dressed up in shiny chrome and flash. He is the painted whore of Hollywood, he is the handmaiden of horrible men like Jerry Bruckheimer; he is Bruckheimer in director’s form, and the world becomes a substantially worse place every time he disgorges or defecates a movie out onto our planet.

That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by Transformers. It’s still an incoherent, character-less mess, but it’s a vaguely entertaining incoherent, character-less mess.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the film did not make me want to gouge my own eyes out and perforate my own eardrums in self-defence or in protest.

The two most recent Bay films, this and The Island, have been high concept science fiction FX-fests with interesting stories and idiotic plots. They’re plots written to cater to people who don’t actually like science fiction that much unless shit blowing up predominates. You could think of Transformers as the unofficial sequel to Independence Day, because there’s barely a bee’s dick between the ludicrousness of either.

They’re also similar in that they have way too many characters with little to do, the main characters really don’t have that much character to them, action trumps dialogue or common sense, both approach technology as if it is magic, and the actions taken by protagonists are insanely nonsensical but effective.

But it also remains, um, true to the source. For those too young to remember, or too cheap to afford cable, Transformers was a cartoon that ran a long time and still runs, in different forms, today. Its purpose was essentially to sell toys, magical wonderful toys that would transform from a car or a truck to a robot, but then again that was the purpose of all cartoons back then. They were and often still are (considering the money behind some of them) little more than marketing.

You would think that grown men like Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg (who is labelled executive producer in this context) would be reluctant to associate themselves with something so childish. But they attack the ‘property’ with gusto, delivering a mostly balls-out action monstrosity that amuses as much as it entertains.

Which isn’t that much, really. Honestly, my benchmark for this is that the flick isn’t really any worse than the most recent Spider-Man flick action-wise. It’s hardly blasphemous to admit such a thing, although the acting in S-M 3, dialogue and character dynamics were a world apart. Still, the action in both is fairly cartoonish and the emotional investment is negligible, so, you know, go figure.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is your regular geeky teenager. All he wants is a car. Little does he know that the Camaro he just bought from a used car dealer is actually an alien robot called Bumblebee.

Bumblebee is an Autobot: a sentient robot from a planet destroyed by a war between the Autobots and the evil Decepticons. They war over control of the planet and control of a magical cube they call the All Spark which has the power to heal impotence, grow hair back, and destroy worlds.

The All Spark, and the evil leader of the Decepticons, Megatron, crashed to Earth a long time ago. Sam’s great great grandfather found something oh so long ago that points to the All Spark’s location, which is why Sam becomes the man of the moment, being the possessor of the old bastard’s glasses.

Simultaneously, a combat unit in the deserts of Qatar is attacked by some kind of nasty robot looking for information. The robot goes all scorpion-like and kills many, many people before the smarter soldiers figure out that they should skedaddle out of Dodge whilst they still can. They, in the corniest fashion possible, give relevance to current world-shaping events by standing in for the brave real world soldiers in Iraq, who are doing their bit there to defend us against all those evil Iraqi robots.

The majority of the flick is alternating action sequences with quieter scenes of people yelling their incontinent incoherent dialogue at each other. Some of it is quite comical. Sam is meant to be the audience stand-in, since he’s the ‘regular’ guy surrounded by increasingly ludicrous characters and circumstances. And he has the Autobots onside, which means everyone is after him. When these giant robots decide to both protect and get out of Sam what they need, they cluster around his house in a way that made me laugh despite myself. There’s something about giant robots trying to be inconspicuous in a suburban garden that provokes involuntary chuckles.

The other thing that’s pretty funny is that the robots have more distinctive dialogue and characterisation than the humans do. Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, speaks portentously and deathly seriously all of the time, and is funny because of it, especially when he’s trying to say something banal. Let’s face it, if you have a voice like Darth Vader, even saying “Could you please pass the salt?” sounds compelling, because it comes out sounding like the voice of doom promising destruction to all.

And that’s what they’re happy to do. When the big robots brawl, it isn’t made expressly clear, but they’re happy to kill hundreds of tiny humans in the process. There are standard Michael Bay scenes of cityscapes being torn apart by a rain of destruction, though it is also (unlike his Bad Boys cop flicks) an entirely bloodless affair.

Sure, so I’ll be the first to admit that I could barely follow the action much of the time, because the CGI robots, whilst impressive visually, are a chaos of polygons, bits and bytes that make some situations look like the acid-ripped delusions of a schizophrenic’s worst nightmares after ingesting way too many Lego blocks.

Favourite (or most tolerable scenes) include the evil Decepticon cop car robot Barricade with “To punish and enslave” stencilled on its side, instead of the more usual “protect and serve), the scenes where Optimus is trying to get the other robots to hide in Sam’s parents garden to avoid parental detection, John Turturro’s incredibly over the top performance as the head of a Men in Black/Area 51 kind of unit which also reveals the source of the last century’s technological advances, and, um, that’s about it. The rest kills time agreeably, but only if you forbid your brain from thinking any thoughts more profound than “stuff blow up good.”

Never forget: this is a kid-level story blown up big for the silver screen. It’s about good giant robots that can morph into cars and other useful shit fighting evil robots that can morph into planes and dildos and such. Even well done this stuff spells intellectual death for the unwary.

In a scene of remarkable hubris, when some apparent meteorites strike the Earth, a fat geek is shown running to one of the landing sites screaming into a mobile phone “It’s like a thousand times better than Armageddon”. He’s not referring to the actual doomsday prophesied at the end of the Bible, which promises to be a doozy; he means the earlier Michael Bay flick. You know what, Michael? Transformers is a thousand times better than Armageddon. But that’s because the bubonic plague was ‘better’ than Armageddon. The death of one’s own parents is a torment marginally less horrible than either Armageddon, or the Bay flick even worse than Armageddon, the truly horrible Pearl Harbor.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that admitting to enjoying a Michael Bay flick, especially one about giant robots, is a profoundly embarrassing set of circumstances. I generally try to conduct myself in a mature and professional fashion, even in the context of these idiotic reviews o’mine. But I can’t help but enjoy some big budget destruction fests with ludicrous premises and cheesy humour (sometimes). I’m only human, and my deep-seeded hatred of all things Michael Bay doesn’t predominate for every second of every day. Even I drop my biases and prejudices occasionally.

But not for too long. Bay still demands an entirely new circle of hell devoted to him and directors like him, and his crimes against humanity should never be forgotten. Every subsequent film he gets to make (and this one will definitely get a sequel) rewards him for his evil, and encourages others to follow in his cloven footsteps.

But, y’know, Transformers itself isn’t too horrible. There, I said it. And it hurts.

6 magnitudes of justice by which Michael Bay’s ironic punishment in Hell will be having to watch his own films on a constant loop for all eternity out of 10.

“Bumblebee, stop lubricating that man.” – Transformers