'Transformers' review

Rating: *1/2 out of ****

Who knew that super advanced robots from outer space would be so shallow? If I traveled across the gulf of space, over god knows how many millions of light-years, I’d have something better to say. Alas, the Transformers have come all this way to spout cheesy one-liners, cornball dialogue and advertisements for EBay. Oh well, at least a lot of stuff blows up real good.

Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ is the live-action adaptation of the classic Hasbro toy line, which has earth vehicles transforming into giant fighting robots. That’s about the extent of the film’s storyline too, the rest of it being a non-stop car commercial and showcase of explosions, everything we’ve come to expect from a Michael Bay flick.

What little story we’re given involves an on-going battle between The Autobots and The Decepticons over the All-Spark, the MacGuffin of the story (Google it). It is a device that can create life out of anything mechanical – including Mountain Dew machines, X-Boxes, and any other product that is convenient for product placement. The All-Spark has found its way to Earth and so the Autobots and Decepticons must duke it out here over their prize. A brief back-story is provided about an explorer who stumbled upon Megatron (the leader of the Decepticons) buried in a glacier a couple hundred years ago. The US government has Megatron now, and so the Decepticons must find him and release him as well as find the All-Spark. The information as to the location of the All-Spark has been imbedded into the lenses of the explorer’s eyeglasses (some how), whose modern day descendent, Sam Whitwicky possesses and is trying to sell on EBay. If the Transformers got their info from EBay and the web, then why couldn’t they set up an EBay account and purchase the glasses?

The audience would be better off learning about the Autobots from the internet, as the movie spends very little time establishing any of them. Most of the human characters suffer the same fate. At least there’s a nice ‘worlds apart yet the same underneath it all’ message tacked on in the end to make us feel warm and fuzzy.

Since the Decepticons will surely destroy Sam to get the glasses, The Autobots have sent a guardian to protect him until the rest of them can arrive in a self-referential ‘Armageddon’ inspired sequence. This guardian is Bumblebee, an old Chevy Camaro who seems to be very sensitive about his aesthetic appearance.

After that, ‘Transformers’ becomes a slick commercial with pockets of non-stop explosions. My hat goes off to Industrial Light and Magic for creating some of the most realistic digital creatures ever seen on film. That being said, many of the battles are shot in extreme close-ups, with shaky cameras and choppy editing that you get lost in the mess of it all. Even when you can see what's happening, a lot of the action goes on and on and on ad nauseam.

The script is uninspired and contains dialogue that almost made me laugh aloud - and not in the good way. I enjoy Shia LeBeouff as an actor and he does what he can with the material given, but I did not believe that his character would be considered a nerd or be picked on at school. I also didn’t believe his attraction to Megan Fox’s character. There is no chemistry between them, besides her being extremely physically attractive, but a blind man could see that.

Almost every government or military character is moronic, making decisions that only endanger humans further. Would the US Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) be left with no military bodyguards while an invasion of Decepticons is going on? If the military held the All-Spark, why decide to hide it in a major populated city where the Decepticons will come to get it, destroying the city and its inhabitants in order to retrieve it? Because the script calls for it as an excuse to get the Transformers into an urban area for the climax and an urban setting is always more exciting than a desolate one. Why sink some vanquished Decepticons to the bottom of the ocean as a cover-up? Did it not occur to the government that studying them would help battle them in the sequel? I guess the military doesn’t think as far ahead as Hollywood does.

Many people I talk to say that I’m reading excessively into this; that it’s based on a toy line, it’s a Michael Bay film, and so I should accept it for what it is and not expect too much from it. I don’t think expecting certain elements of realism or character is expecting too much. If you want to adapt a toy/cartoon into a live action film and make it believable in a live action world, then there are basic rules of realism, physics and common sense that must apply. ‘Transformers’ gets the physics and realism of the robots accurate. They look and feel real; textured with thousands of moving parts, with real gravity and weight to them. It’s everyone and everything else around the robots that are not believable. The filmmakers spent so much time making the Transformers themselves seem real that it’s the characters, story and plot that feel fake.

Perhaps 'Transformers' makes a good statement about the state of modern movies. After all, when every one of the digital characters are more believable than every flesh and blood character, that must be saying something.