Reviews > Transformers

Honestly, I don’t get it.

I’ve talked to eight different people about Transformers, and all of them have liked it. WHY this is the case, I can’t imagine.

Transformers has all the problems one would typically associate with a Michael Bay action flick – namely, too many explosions and almost no character development whatsoever – and then combines them with the problems inherent in making a Hollywood-ized version of Transformers.

The screenwriters assumed that the audience wouldn’t possibly be able to empathize with JUST a bunch of talking robots for two and a half hours, so we spend far too much time with a bunch of different human characters, whilst simultaneously failing to learn anything about them, or care about them in any particular way. The ONLY human characters the audience will have any connection to are Shia LeBouf (because he’s funny), Megan Fox (because she’s distractingly attractive), and John Turturro (because he looks depressed that his considerable talents are being wasted). Everyone else is either phoning it on (Jon Voight) or too inconsequential a character to even matter.

And yet I could have handled this, had the robot bits only been more interesting. This was not the case. Not ONLY is Optimus Prime not the main Transformer (he’s technically the Autobot leader, but he doesn’t get the most screen time and the audience isn’t asked to care about him), but Megatron doesn’t even show up until the last fifteen minutes. Instead, the audience is asked to sympathize with Bumblebee, which works fine – but considering this IS a Transformers movie, why would you EVER relegate Optimus Prime and fucking MEGATRON to secondary character status?

But fanboy irritation aside (I never actually watched the show that much, but I can see where a fan would be irritated), the Transformer fight scenes really don’t work in and of themselves. Yeah, the CGI may be the best ever put on film, but Michael Bay’s direction makes it all for naught: he puts the camera too close and the Transformers are made up of too many over-detailed parts, resulting in robot fights that don’t actually resemble robot fights as much as they do one big, metallic blur crashing into another big, metallic blur. This uber-detailed art style also makes it damn near impossible to differentiate between several of the Transformers: when Megatron ripped an Autobot in half, I wasn’t feeling despair or shock, but rather confusion at WHICH Autobot he’d killed.

The climax is underwhelming, the action unexciting,the line “one shall stand, and one shall fall” is delivered off-screen, and it’s damn near impossible to care about anyone.

Ignore it, and go watch the first ten minutes of the old animated movie instead.