A dusted-off review of 'Transformers', for all those with recently teenage'd children who find it has suddenly appeared in their DVD collection:
There was a time when a project such as this would have been considered below Michael Bay – this is the man who, along with Jerry Bruckheimer, helped create the modern twenty-something’s blockbuster: all swearing, violence, and drugs; Bad Boys was a film for people who felt 48 Hours too risqué. Don Simon’s affection for a lifestyle matched only by the pace of his films cost him his life, and Bruckheimer, perhaps sensing the danger to himself but not wanting to pass up a buck, altered and in effect neutered his own product so that it cold reach as large an audience as possible. Bay, too, while always selling to grown-up children, has embraced the wider opportunities that come with peddling one’s product specifically to the virgin-market. 2005’s The Island may have been his last stab at anything resembling artistic integrity – dull scene followed dull scene for two hours and it was obvious Bay’s heart was not in it, while the massively negative commercial and critical response meant that, thankfully, such an exercise would never be repeated. Now, Steven Spielberg has been brought on board to see to the controlling of the lesser angels of Bay’s nature, as he before has overseen children-oriented films such as Gremlins and Small Soldiers. So, arriving like a case of cheap Belgian beer to a party everyone was about to leave, Transformers is laid expectantly in the middle of 2007’s blockbuster season, and we’re all invited to dig in and lose a few more brain cells.
The strangest thing about the movie is that it spends so long trying to convince us all that it is anything but a film based on a toy brand. Barring a ludicrous (but quite welcome) prologue, the first hour or so relegate the eponymous characters and action as much to the margins as is possible. The car purchased by our hero Sam Witwicky remains resolutely a car, and the attacks perpetrated on American soldiers in Qatar seem more like outtakes from an aborted Terminator 4 project than scenes from a Hasbro-made production. Perhaps to compensate for such an extended opening act the makers stuff in enough slapstick and high school humour that only the richly fussy visual style reminds one that this is not a Chris Weitz picture. While much of this is funny, thanks in part to the comic timing of Shia LaBeouf, it seems bolted on for our pleasure rather than an innate part of the picture. Unfortunately, this desperation to please hangs around for the duration of the film, like a bad smell, culminating in an embarrassing performance from Anthony Anderson, and one which frankly does not deserve mentioning from John Turturro.
He plays a man from the shadowy government agency called Section 7, an agency so secret not even the Secretary of Defence has heard of it or takes it seriously at first – which makes one wonder how they manage to get anything done: mystique is one thing, anonymity is quite another. Section 7’s brief appears to have been to generally hang around until all hell breaks loose on planet earth, at which point they shall gather all the characters given more than token amounts of screen time up until this point (and, what the hey, a couple of the tokens as well) and explain to them at length how exactly the screenwriters have managed to engineer a world and narrative in which cars which transform into robots can operate with a minimum of humiliation. This involves a quasi-nuclear cube-shaped power-source (called, ingeniously, ‘the cube’), an arctic explorer from the nineteenth century, the reverse engineering of the microchip from a dormant Megatron, and not a great deal of success. Such explanations – and indeed the characters that spout them – are soon forgotten as, having forced us and himself to meander through nearly ninety minutes of mostly explosion-free muddle, Bay is allocated the second half of his budget, and so begins a third act of unrelenting action.
The battle for earth begins at the Hoover Dam – which remains unaccountably standing, being quickly discarded for the lesser expenses of the American highway (that most recent and uninteresting of action-scenery to be discovered by Hollywood, for which we have the Wachowski brothers to thank) and the urban centre of an effectively anonymous mid-size American city. Here, in a movie which began at a military base in Qatar and has featured references to North Korea and Iran begins – if one squints out the robots and concentrates on the screaming civilians, the almost constant air-strikes, the rubble-strewn streets – to resemble a particularly bad day in Baghdad. American GI’s, happy to be involved in a war between two cultures they have very little understanding of and have heretofore treated with bureaucratic hostility, assist the unquestionably virtuous in their plight to destroy the cacklingly evil. Untold damage to property (but no – human – lives lost; please, this is a 12) ensues, and it all looks, to be sure, rather astounding. No one throws a car through the air quite like Bay, even if one can practically see the man bent over his toy box playing these moments out around the clock for the last thirty years of his life. And then there are the Transformers themselves: the cinematic equivalents of the Hasbro toys (no doubt to be re-released and updated with a charm lobotomy) somersaulting through the air like Russian gymnasts. These machines are neither metal nor plastic, but that strange digital substance which sounds so very weighty (all metallic crunching and grinding and thrombotic echoes when hit by heavy artillery) but which looks like some highly polished and solidified version of silly putty, or moulded chewing gum. The special effects are highly accomplished, but they remain observably “special”, like a British stage thespian parachuted in to give some life and soul to proceedings, who hams up a storm and has a grand old time doing so: entertaining yes, but conspicuous above that which surrounds it. As polished as the effects are, seeing massive robots battle it out between skyscrapers will always be reminiscent of everything of a similar ilk from Godzilla to The Power Rangers Movie.
Ultimately, the film draws to a close like the piece of teenage entertainment it was always going to be. The job that it set out to do it has accomplished with minimal success. While people on the internet may wish that someone like David Fincher had brought these robots in disguise to the screen, any sane person knew that was not going to happen. Intellectual rigour was never going to be the name of the game; accepting that, Bay may well have been the best man for the job. To gripe about what Transformers is would be churlish; rather, I only find it a pity that such a piece of fluff has received so much monetary backing – it seems to be the devil’s arithmetic of contemporary Hollywood moviemaking that the lowest common denominator picks up the lion’s share of the pie of budget and marketing simply because it has the potential to reach the widest audience.
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