Colombo Critic.com

Michael Bay deserves an award or two for his contributions to the art of film making. I believe that his films should be compulsory subjects in film school as guides to making financially successful movies. The actual dynamics of such movies are quite complex, but can be summarized as follows:

1. Throw in as many pyrotechnics, plot twists, love-triangles (and/or sexy women) and explosions as you can afford
2. Don’t hire Ben Affleck as a lead actor
3. If you hire Ben Affleck and another hot male lead and you have to kill one of them… kill Ben Affleck

And Bay’s filmography does support this as his least critically successful films fail on rules 2 and 3. Thankfully, it appears that he’s grown out of his Affleck phase and moved on to better things (Let’s just pretend that The Island didn’t happen…mmkay?)

The Synopsis

So, Transformers. Giant robots that posses the ability to transform into mechanical devices (usually vehicles) search the galaxy for the Allspark, which is basically a big cube which is used to create robotic life.

The story centers around a geeky highschool kid named Sam Witwicky and his mission to own his very own car… which turns out to be a Transformer in the form of a 1977 Chevy Camaro named Bumblebee. Turns out that Bumblebee’s tracked Sam down because his Great Grand Pappy stumbled across something over a century ago and the Transformers need Grandpa’s reading glasses to… wait for it… read a map. And they found Sam through his eBay page. Snazzy Hollywood writing at its finest.

You can read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia, but thankfully this film survives the sub-par writing and is quite enjoyable in spite of it. There’s also a lot of stuff carried over from the original Transformers Canon but updated considerably for this incarnation. Whether this is good or bad comes down to personal preference.

The Cast and Acting

Hearing Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime after all these years brought up the 12-year old boy inside of me, but a couple of antacid pills quickly sorted that out. Note to self: Boyscouts give me indigestion.

But seriously, what we have here is a very competent cast with the likes of Jon Voight, John Turturro and Shia LaBeouf. You’ve also got Rachael Taylor as this movies Token Aussie. Sadly, while the acting is generally good, the human actors are completely upstaged by the CG Robots. I’m not saying that the Robots are that good, it’s just that it’s hard to focus on the acting when a hundred tonne monstrosity is taking up three-quarters of the screen.

So, this movie is all about big pointy things hitting other big pointy things with… big pointy things. Typical Michael Bay then. So, lets waste no more time and move onto…

…The Pointy Things!

This film caught a lot of flack for the liberties they’ve taken with the original designs of the Transformers… some of it quite justified. The designs are over-complicated and utterly confusing when there’s a lot going on. Because of their complexity it can sometimes be hard to figure out exactly who, or what you’re looking at in the action sequences. Still, it works quite well most of the time and the characters are believable….. most of the time. And the action sequences, while over the top, are refreshingly new. It’s been a while since we’ve had a giant robot movie and this one fills that gap quite well.

In Conclusion

You might assume that you’re going to be sitting down to watch one movie, but what you actually get is almost three different movies chopped up and stapled together. You’ve got the quirky family comedy of the Witwickys, and you’ve got the action comedy of the Rangers with Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his buddies blowing stuff up out in the desert. Then you’ve got the robots from outer space driving around in their American Muscle car bods looking for their box of goodies. Each one of these plots would have made a great movie, but mashed together… not so much. The seams are quite glaringly visible and full of plot holes you can drive an Optimus Prime through.

And you can’t ignore the stamp of franchise and product tie-ins that surround this movie. Bumblebee just happens to pick the (then) un-released 2007 Camaro? Wow, just how dumb do they think we are? This ranks up their with Will Smith’s sneakers in I, Robot.

At the end of it all you have to ask yourself if this movie does justice to the original cartoons and comics on which it is based. For the most part, it does. The film is full of very fun and believable characters (mojo, customer service rep) and the action is a cut above the norm. And thankfully this film is accessible to people who have no idea just what all the fuss is about to begin with. Michael Bay’s done a remarkable job, despite the flaws, of rebooting the franchise and created something that is, at the very least, entertaining.

Now, all we need to do is find a director that can transform Ben Affleck into a good actor.