Transformers
Rating: 4/10
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the blockbuster. By definition, it’s designed to reach the biggest movie-going audience possible, compromising any artistic credibility. It has to be violent without being too violent, sexy without being too sexy, serious, yet funny, non-offensive, and so on. Most importantly, a blockbuster has to be big, intimidating, larger than life.
Transformers is as formulaic as they come. It feels almost like a study in blockbusterism. First off, you have your paint by numbers launch: Out in the middle of nowhere (desert setting of course) something really weird and bad happens. Luckily, before the proverbial bad stuff hits the fan, we get a chance to meet a few chatty soldier dudes. We hear what they miss from back home, one of them even video conferences with his wife and their baby, who he’s not yet met in person. Even though an evil helicopter robot thing obliterates their entire base, our new friends somehow manage to be in the right place at the right time and escape.
Then we shift to a high school classroom where somehwat-geeky outsider Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is making a presentation about this great grandfather. Being the typical teenager, Sam’s biggest priority is buying a pair of wheels and getting the attention of fellow student Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox).
As luck would have it, Sam’s first car is actually a robot, but not one of those bad ones that did bad stuff in the desert. Even better, the car does get him the girl. I mean, brilliant. Life in a blockbuster is unfortunately not so easy. The bad robots are looking for a certain cube and the good robots want to stop them. The location of said cube leads them to Sam. I don’t want to give away any “exciting” details, but I’ll give you a hint: It all ties together.
What follows are a lot of loud action sequences and badness beating goodness, but goodness coming back, and so on and so forth. The robots look great, not doubt. Their infused hip personalities are what ruined it for me. I’ll take robots, no problem, but tone down the attitude. The music by Steve Jablonsky also proved immensely irritating. After literally every minute we are submitted to another sweeping, momentous theme that forces us to realize how important and earth shattering the sequence is. As in all blockbusters, we are also provided with moments of comic relief (painkiller-addicted dog named Mojo, president with cowboy accent wearing red socks, asking a stewardess for a Ding Dong). The music is there to hammer homoe that things are getting heavy again. I’ve never felt so manipulated. Director Michael Bay could really take a lesson from the Coen Brothers and their meisterwerk, No Country For Old Men. There is practically no music in the whole film. I love music, but watching that film was so incredibly refreshing. Watch it and bathe in the silence.
Once Transformers was over, after being pounded with over two hours of the blockbuster experience, I realized several things. One, I had a headache. Two, Shia LaBeouf, who I really liked in A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, was able to pull off a decent performance in a Michael Bay film; a worthy feat. Three, I’m looking forward to watching LaBeouf in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or just Indiana Jones 4, for those who favor brevity. Four, Megan Fox looks like a young Jennifer Connelly after a bath in self-tanning lotion and a serious bout of teeth whitening. (Unfortunately, she doesn’t have Connelly’s acting chops.) And five, blockbusters just ain’t my cup of tea. I’ll watch them, but, afterwards, I almost always feel like I was taken for a ride. Indeed, Transformers was no exception.
Buy Transformers
