Review of Transformers (2007) by Kenneth L — 26 Aug 2015

It takes an added sight toward trend spotting in the abstraction of fanasy beyound the mere suspending of disbelief to see a harder outline of real imminent substance imerge to become fully engrossed in the meaning & message as well as the action, comedy, peril & romance that delivers it simply & profoundly in this movie.

SPOILER ALERT WARNING DO NOT READ BEYOUND THIS POINT UNLESS YOU LOVE BEING SPOILED AS MUCH AS I DO SPOILER ALERT (spoiler police not allowed).

The meaning of this movie is of course carried in the simple time capsuled matrix allspark cube from beyound the stars of other worlds of asexual creatures, tintured by enlightened self-aware/adaptive/replicative materials into intelligent beings capable of the infinite immortality of autogenic evolution. Transformers, the toy & cartoon comic, does not come out of a vaccuum independent of the instillment into the human imagination of this idea & all that it has wrought already on the technical course that human evolution has gathered into the path of, on which it has traveled already for some time toward a set of thresh-holds that make the dialectic between autobot and decepticon pervasively present among us already. The very conceptualization for and execution of this film project in the first place is a perfect examplification of this self-same process already & the subtlies of its in-plain-sight imminence. After all, the allspark is an obvious etiological out-growth of sparkplug & its mysterious power to drive our internally combusted modern machine world that even now acts all too often as though with a mind of of its own by the rules of its own internal logic beyound our grasp or control. The cube seeming to represent the infinite puzzle of seemingly limitless effemeralization of our information technologies into boundless portabilities & expressiveness. Beyound any abstract anology of metaphore comes the tantilizing inkling of our advanced technical civilization as the inevitable outcome of just such an invasion that will inevitably threaten human extiction that does not become its future through its gestation in the womb of the human imagination.

The choice presented in this movie is didactly stark & clear as if a black & white choice between good & evil. Will our technology rule us, driving us into extinction, then replacing us altogether; or; will it remain permenantly in its present benign state of symbiotic bondage to ever greater degrees of amplified human capabilities no matter what degree of self aware abstract reason & imagination it develops as the enivitable result of that amplification. Have we, unawares, already bitten off more than we can chew? Or, have our Tranformer decepticons already come home to roost as the ghost in our worldwidewebed machinery? Is there an Autobot Optimus safeguard construct eternally ready to protect our eternal supremacy & that of our organic evolution? Ultimately, should there be? When Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) tells Megatron (Hugo Weaving) in the final throws of their culminating death match that human freedom is worth his ultimate sacrifice, he must surely be speaking of it as some deep wisdom of understanding of how valuable & precious a gift this little understood estate of human beingness could be to all Cybertron & its far flung inheritance if nurtured & carefully guarded so that it be allowed to florish unfrettered. Bumblebee (Mark Ryan) as advance scout for the Autobots Allspark quest on earth had made that discovery on his own with his infiltration of Sam Witwicky (Shia La Beouf) & the endearing way he complimented his courtship of Michaela Banes (Megan Fox). Its innate spontaneity that always carries an accidental portion of constantly creating & recreating accomodativeness was instantly recognizible as a typical persona of the species. This was not mere mimicry that the bots were more than perfectly capable of. But something the originizing of which had its own unique divine spark of organic sexual evolution that could be lost forever if not kept in balance with the autogneic capabilities the bots could bring to it into a new homeostatic synergy. This was the vision of the new future for both species AND the whole courses of evolution they each epitomized.

Human civilization on earth had already belied the presence of the cube &/or its Megatron persuer with its ubiquitous use of back engineered signaling & other technologies. Especially with its interplanetary probes. It seems to be coming under the influence of at least something akin to the techno-animating allspark cube or some usefull analogy thereof. And whatever draws the interest of the decepticons inevitably draws that of the Autobots & visa-versa. Thus it is ever since their war for the cube destroyed their own planet setting them adrift to the far flung reaches. Drifting until the mysteriously disappearing cube is recovered & brought under more benign control by the Autobot faction or used to gain total compulsion over the whole universe by Megatron's Decepticon dictatorship or as a third choice somehow destroyed to no longer threaten or promise anyone.

The invisable government blackops of secret weapons technology power base that baited the lure of Cybertron Transformer interest was Pres. Herbert Hoover's above top secret working group, called Section 7, to coverup & exploit the discovery of the cube in the Grand Canyon with a namesake dam. Added to this was confirmation & retreaval of the 1897 discovery of Megatron frozen deep in the ice by Archibald Witwicky while failing to reach the north pole by ship to be kept in permenant cryostasis. Archibald was blinded & crazed by some navagational focus beam triggered in the course of the discovery with the etchings left in his glasses being the key to the whole final fateful rondezvous and showdown between the whole bunch of pro & anti human Transformers in his great grandson's day with his E Bay tipoff.

Only right at the very begining, when setting up the character of the anchoring protagonist, his romantic connection to his sexual attraction & main backup as well as his direct connection to the globally fatefull significance of his grandpa's little artifact collection is the story board anything less than flipbook fast. The rest comes right up your nose in your face constantly careening out of control gang buster zoom boom crash pure uncontained confusion of constantly recalibrating action. This is a Michael Bay type of movie so obviously just the way he likes it. Action so fast, its impossible to comprehend it all. And sometimes, at all. You can see some Steven Spielberg in the way the human interest & romance and some of the lead characters are allowed to develop but the rest is definately Bay all the way.

It seems pretty obvious that John Rogers with the initial story and absolutely obvious that Roberto Orci & Alex Krutzman were writing a Spielberg consulted but Bay directed movie far more than any Simon Furman Generation I Ultimate Guide "Creation Matrix" plot device. It was probably producer Don Murphy's original idea for the whole project in the first place.

Academy nominated for Sound & Sound Editing as well as Visual Effects it had lots of catchy old favorites well placed & paced. Steve Jablonsky, student of Hans Zimmer did the score on the Culver City Sony Scoring Stage. "Transformers: The Album" & "Transformers:The Score" seemed to do well.

The whole thing was a recruiting poster for the US Air Force & Marines as well as a placement add campaign for General Motors & particularly Chevy's 1976 Camaro camoflage version of Bumblebee. It also served as a display case for Holloman Air Force Base and their whole collection of F22's, F117's, V22Ospreys, A-10 Thunderbolts, AC130 & AWACS. First film crew allowed at the Pentagon since 9/11. A beautiful action tourist poster of Hoover Dam. LA stands in for Mission City for the big tearup the town showdown.

'Ray tracing' is perfected & carried to its furtherest extremes. Showing off the shiney gleam of the hot burner paint jobs of the Autobots vehicular transformations. But also giving far more depth definition & texture then would otherwise be expected to much of the CGI. The Transformers and their transformations, especially in cambat are just unbelievably awesome & intensely fascinating & intimidatingly bewildering. Their grace, speed, elagance & beauty are very super & very human. Decepticons: Blackout, Scorponok, (4 Foot tall) Frenzy (Reno Wilson), Barricade, Starscream (Charles Adler), Brawl & Bonecrusher as well as Megatron; Autobots: Jazz, Ironside, Ratchet as well as Bumblebee & Optimus Prime.

Shia La Beouf as Ladies Man 217 Sam Witwicky was always very believable & comfortably enjoyable even as an awkward geek teenager with a hopelessly fixated crush on the most popular jock's most popular girlfriend. Megan Fox did almost as well as the highscool's most sought after hottie Michaela Banes who warms to Sam & is then drawn into the perilous roller coaster that Bumblebee, first appearing as his 1976 Camaro first car, takes them, into the heart of Section 7, the lair of the vast government conspiracy that hides the frozen Megatron & his unobtainable cube quary. Josh Duhamel did well as the Marine Capt. William Lennox an athletic engager with enemy fire who always seemed to have a handle on the whole situation no matter how out of hand it got. Also took me by surprise when he just automatically took sides with Sam on letting Bumblebee go to defend the cube from capture by an awakening Megatron against the officially higher ranking Section 7 commander man in black Agent Simmons (John Turturro). Rachel Tayler did well as the greenhorn kid antihacker Maggie Madsen that caught Frenzy on Air Force One downloading the whole DOD files & planting a total info tech blackout virus worldwide. Anthony Anderson plays Glen Witman who becomes Maggie's assistant then finally learns to bypass the EMP fried com link to possible Pentagon rescue during a final showdown with Frenzy at Hoover Dam. Jon Voight seems fairly adept & situationally aware as Sec Def John Kelly. Bernie Mack played a very humorous Bobbie Bolivia while being spooked by a very insistant Camaro into giving Sam an affordable deal. Tyrese Gibson played Capt. Lennox's right hand backup as USAF CombatController Tech Sgt. Robert Epps.

On the whole, a rip roaring demolition derby of a cautionary parable for how at least in fantasy, at least for now, we could theroetically be invaded & all our machines on whom we've entrusted more & more of our survival funtions turned into agents of extermination, wherein our only hope may end up being other benign machines alturistically coming to our rescue ... Don't count on it!