Review of Transformers (2007) by Flickfreaks83 — 11 Dec 2015

It is not, you should understand, a film for those who seek the solace of art. It is, however, the most straight-up, brain-on-standby, CG-buffed explosion of out-and-out fun the summer has yet delivered. Another of cinema’s great exponents, Alfred Hitchcock, would often despair of certain cinemagoers’ predilection for plot logic. He would ignore the cry of these ‘Plausibles’ and fiddle his books with rollicking suspense. Michael Bay, too, is no friend of the Plausibles, but his trick is to deafen them with ‘Bayhem’ (def: blowing **** up at sunset). Even amongst the geek-lore of sci-fi he remains more concerned with laying waste to LA than a redoubtable internal logic.

It shouldn’t startle you to hear that the plot is ludicrous: a box (varying in size from a city block to a handbag — nothing in the movie is capable of sitting still) with the power to reconfigure machines into Transformers (at one witty point a drinks dispenser sprouts mechanoid legs and a cannon that fires cans at people) has ended up on Earth. As, currently, have these opposing gangs of super-robots. First stop is a dumb kid whose great-grandfather’s glasses have.

The imprint of a map of the box’s location... Oh, forget it. Listen, good robots fight bad ones and we get in the way. The end.

Bay has done himself a real favour casting LaBeouf as the excitable loser about to discover his first car has a big surprise under the hood. He shares the pop-neurotic jabber of a young Woody Allen with Tom Hanks’ steady charisma, a straightforward-looking guy who still shines like a movie star. A smart, natural comedian, he levels the bluntness of this toy story with an ironic bluster. Quite apart from his car growing legs, he’s been fidgety enough about the legs of classmate Mikaela (Megan Fox). Drunkenly lapped up by Bay’s lascivious camera, she still comes with a steel core (it’s not just the cars who’ve got hidden centres): Mikaela’s a whizz with engines, not that boys can get beyond her windshield. In fact, all the girls of the movie come moulded to a geek ideal: stunning and boyishly practical. In one of the overextended subplots we get Australian beauty Rachael Taylor as an NSA computer dweeb cracking the Decepticons’ code.

The cast is at its best young: the older actors, notably Jon Voight and John Turturro as governmental stooges as slow on the uptake as many a parent might be, hammily herk and jerk as if undergoing their own internal shake-up. The film is least sure when mustering global peril, testing the waters of inference with an attack on an American military base in . The first suspects are the Iranians, and along the way there’s a few spry digs at the Bush administration, but any politicising is swiftly reduced to a potty super-Secret Service known as Sector Seven who’ve got Megatron in a deep freeze inside the Hoover Dam, and the film gets on with its juvenile doctrine of daft punk.

As the ’bots show up for a big showdow in humanville, soldiers spilling about like ants, a nonsense/genius tribute to old monster-movies, it’s all about the Sturm und Drang of pure action. It’s a dream-clatter of robot-on-robot war to drive Craig Charles to drugs. On old Orson’s level — “big toys attacking smaller toys” — it truly delivers.

It’s a shame, then, that Michael Bay can’t help being Michael.

The script may have rubbery legs, but the action is rock-hard. The surprise is the lightness of touch: treat as a comedy for best results.