Transformers! Not much more than meets the eyes. (spoilers)

Let me preface this review by being open and honest. I grew up with the original toys, none of the Beast Wars or Armada garbage, I mean old school G1. I still have an original Optimus Prime sitting up on my bookcase, big trailer and everything. Those Transformers, as well as GI Joes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will always conjure up images of playing with friends, back in the day when it was possible to do anything if you had an action figure and an imagination.

Nostalgia can be a powerful force. Experiences from our childhoods can conjure up powerful forces in us; make us remember what it was like to not have to worry about all the responsibilities that have come with growing older. Life was simpler as a child, the smallest things could bring us joy, and the items that connect us back to memories of those days can serve as powerful artifacts indeed.

Nostalgia can also cause us to do some pretty stupid things too. Like giving Michael Bay 150 million dollars in a week.

Again I'll be perfectly honest; I went to this film only because of the name. If I had seen advertisements for a film directed by Michael Bay about giant fighting robots that come to wage their war on earth called "Super Mega Fighters X6000" I would have laughed my ass off and stayed at home, saving myself the six dollars ticket cost (I'm just glad I found a theater that was under eight bucks…), but because it was Transformers, and nostalgia being as I described above, I shelled out the money, much to my eternal shame.

I have a bias against Michael Bay; I won't try to hide that. The man is a hack. Plain and simple, there's no other way to describe him. His directing style has not evolved since the days when he did music videos, and every movie he does plainly illustrates his 'style over substance' method. Now I'm not going to say I hated everything movie he's done, because that's not true, he has made a couple of movies that were entertaining. But that's all they were, entertaining. He has never made a movie I would consider good cinema, and that fact continues with the crap fest that was Transformers.

The movie opens with an Optimus Prime monologue that immediately left me scratching my head in puzzlement. Apparently there's a cube… like a Borg ship from Star Trek or something? Only it's like a God cube… and it created life on the Transformer home world? The Allspark they called it, which to me sounded like a brand of spark plugs I might buy at Auto Zone rather than an all powerful life giving entity. So this cube crashes to earth following the titanic battle between the Autobots and Decepticons cause they both want the Allspark for their own ends, though the Autobots apparently have noble ends for it, which of course goes without saying right?

Head forward into the future and now we're on earth, at an army base in Qatar. The base is like any other base in the Middle East except Tyrese and Josh Duhamel are there! Sweet! I read somewhere that Michael Bay was able to get funding from the U.S. Army for this film. I'm not sure why they'd agree to it since they just end up looking REALLY bad when an evil robot disguised as a previously shot down helicopter shows up and demolishes the army base. Plus if Tyrese and Josh Duhamel are the best we can muster in this day and age then I am worried indeed. So the Decepticon, Blackout, goes on a rampage launching Michael Bay explosions and shockwaves across the screen while still finding time to hack into the super top secret mainframe the military just happens to keep on a makeshift army base. Blackout ultimately fails though, as the hard line is cut before he has a chance to finish wading his way through the top secret plans for invading Iran, Sweden, or Canada.

Now at this point we cross an ocean to start what I like to think of as movie B. It’s important to understand that there are in fact three different movies going on at the same time within this film, with only the most peripheral of connections to each other until they are train wrecked together at the tail end. Movie B is the bulk of the film and deals with Shia LaBeouf, as Sam Witwicky, wanting to get into Meghan Fox’s, as Mikaela Banes, 21 year old high school junior size 00 pants. There are some other plot details that are supposed to be important, like the fact that he’s the grandson of a famous explorer who went crazy after finding an iceman that later turns out to be Megatron, but mostly it’s a chance for Michael Bay to put Meghan Fox in skimpy clothing to distract from the already mind numbing pain this film was inflicting on me.

Anyhow, Sam’s dad ends up buying him a beat up old Camaro from Bernie Mac, playing… well playing Bernie Mac essentially. It of course turns out the car is an Autobot, the first hint we get of them a good half an hour into the movie. At this point the viewer better hold onto his hat! It’s time for another transition! Back to movie A?

Nope! Now we’re taken to Washington D.C. to the pentagon, the ground zero for plotline C, and the most insipid of all three. This one involves hackers! And Jon Voight! Seriously, I didn’t get what an accomplished actor like Jon Voight was doing in this film… but hey even Voight gots ta get paid right? Ugh. So once more there’s a sexy woman, only instead of being a high schooler of legal drinking age she’s a super tech signal analyst! And she’s the only one who can crack the code to figure out who or what attacked the base at Qatar right? Well, not exactly, but with the help of the big guy from Kangaroo Jack she’ll get close… at least before they’re arrested.

You know what? Just trying to relive this movie enough in my head to fully review it scene by scene is causing me to just have nasty flashbacks. If I keep this up I’ll have nightmares of ugly CGI and John Turturro being ‘lubricated’ on. So let me just do a quick cap here. Eventually it’s revealed that Sam’s grandpappy’s glasses have a map to the Allspark etched into them, so that’s why everyone wants to get at Sam, only the glasses are completely unnecessary as everyone finds their way to the cube eventually, which It turns out is housed under the Hoover Dam, the same place they’re storing a frozen Megatron they’ve moved from the north pole. Eventually all the good guys and all the bad guys meet up and you can tell the stage is being set for a robotic showdown of epic proportions. Of course it would be boring if the finale took place in an isolated area like the Hoover Dam, so everyone flies or drives off to the city where they can all do some real damage, and give Michael Bay a chance to have more attractive women show up in small cameos. The movie ends predictably enough, with Optimus Prime prepared to sacrifice himself to destroy the Allspark only to have Sam turn and destroy Megatron instead. Oh yeah, much better idea huh Prime? Meanwhile all the major characters survive for the next craptastic sequel. Even Megatron is still alive; though I’m sure we’re supposed to think it was the end of him. Ugh whatever. I’m getting indigestion just remembering this stuff.

Even with all the things I’m willing to forgive because I’m seeing my childhood come to life on the big screen this movie was still awful. People have tried to defend it by claiming that it was meant to be, a cheesy film with great action. First off there’s a line between cheesy and just plain stupid, and this movie was so far over on the stupid side that the line wasn’t even visible anymore. Bay, in his attempts to juggle the light-hearted fun of the original transformers, the classic good versus evil nature of an action movie, and the coming of age story between Sam and Mikaela, fails on every account. The scene in which the Autobots try to hide from Sam’s parents was a prime example of how badly written this movie was. Optimus Prime trampling mom’s flower gardens and saying lines like “my bad” were just painful to watch.

Secondly, and perhaps an even bigger flaw in this movie, the action scenes were too few and far between, and the majority of them were so derivative that I was groaning in boredom by the climactic fight scene at the end of the movie. There was very little variety in the fights, the robots would either tackle and punch at each other or they would launch rockets. Plus the design of the transformers made it very hard to follow the action during some of the scenes. It would often simply look as if there were just big balls of metal parts rolling across the ground, no clue who was on top, who was getting the advantage over the other until the fight was just as suddenly over. People have hailed this as one of the most amazing action films they’ve ever seen, but for the most part I was disappointed. If Bay was going to screw up the story, which everyone knew he would, he could have at least made sure the action came often enough, and was riveting enough, to distract from his poor character development, but alas it was not to be.

All in all this movie did not disappoint me, because I went into the theater knowing I was going to be frustrated with the end result of the film. I knew with Michael Bay behind the helm the Transformers would end up feeling like a two and half hour music video commercial for GMC, and it did. Do I regret having seen it in theaters? Absolutely, but with the Transformers name in the title I had to go, the little kid inside of me wouldn’t have let me sit this one out. Still I got off better than my friend who, despite my numerous reassurances that Michael Bay would turn this into another pile of garbage, went into the theater expecting a truly thrilling cinematic ride and came out cursing the name of Michael Bay. But if this film has taught me anything it’s that I should do everything in my power to purchase the rights to a GI Joe movie, because as long as the name is up there it doesn’t matter what type of film I make, I’ll pull down nine figures easy.