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« How I Learned to Stop Worrying (or Party for the Planet) | Home | Hate Crime Survivor, Thought Recovering, Now Suicides » Transformers: Their war. Our ears.
By David W. Shelton | July 3, 2007 |
With that, you can imagine how I was ready to unload with both barrels on Bay’s latest film. Imagine my complete and utter frustration when I came to realize that I actually liked the movie. Transformers is a summer action film which is clearly aimed at a testosterone-driven audience. I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that I screened the film in a theatre filled with local soldier boys, geeks, dweebs, and their pals who came to see lots of explosions and hear bad dialogue. Indeed, they got their money’s worth. There’s a lot to hate about Transformers. It’s long, and it’s loud. It appeals to nearly every conceivable alpha male stereotype with sexy girls, anti-gay jokes, masturbation quips, and at least two incidents where urination is used for the sake of humor. My, how we’ve come in a society where bathroom jokes are the norm. The action scenes are difficult to follow, and when the robots are fighting, it’s just a blur of explosions and metal. There’s not a lot of motivation for the evil Decepticons, either. They’re just evil. And they like to blow stuff up. I always wondered why the Autobots never could fly in the cartoons. It would have been more of a fair fight. I still wonder about that.
The robots’ dialogue is simply horrible. The Decepticons were never able to master English, which is a good thing. At least we only had to read the subtitles when they deliver their atrocious lines. The Autobots, on the other hand, were able to learn our language “on the World Wide Web.” Transformers is a 144-minute commercial. No, wait. It’s three commercials in one: 1) the Hasbro toy line (After all, the opening credits list Hasbro as a financer for the film), 2) General Motors, especially the new Chevrolet Camaro (Notice that all of the Autobots (except Optimus Prime) are from the GM line, and the Decepticon police car is an evil Ford Mustang), and 3) the Army (they need to recruit new folks for Iraq, you know). Put simply, Transformers is garbage. But it’s good garbage. It never takes itself too seriously, and is clearly marketed for those of us who have a limited attention span. Even with so much to hate, I still liked the movie. Oh, how I wish I could hate it. I wanted to hate it. But I just couldn’t! After all, gosh darn it, I’m a fan. The movie somehow… miraculously… appealed to my inner twelve-year-old. Even as bad as Optimus Prime’s dialogue was, Peter Cullen’s voice was enough to make me believe in him again. “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” he said. Heck, he even repeats a line that’s from the 1987 animated film. No, I’m not telling you which one.
The story revolves around this ancient cube from Cybertron called the Allspark. Apparently, it would turn our own technology against us, so the Autobots have to find it before the treacherous Decepticons do. The only one who has the key to find it is a teenage boy named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). Sam is the typical smartaleck kid who has just gotten his first car. It’s LaBeouf that shines as the overall star of the film, and might even outshine the robots themselves. The first act of the movie revolves around the fact that Sam’s 1979 Chevrolet Camaro is actually a robot in disguise called Bumblebee (sorry fanboys, he’s not a VW Beetle). In a nod to the cartoon, there’s a yellow beetle right next to Bumblebee in the car lot where Sam and his dad are to buy his first car. Bumblebee is heroic, and apparently has earned the respect and admiration of the much larger Optimus Prime. He also shows the most depth of character of any of the robots. There are plenty of cardboard characters in Transformers, especially the ones played by Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight, and John Turturro. The only reason they’re there is to ooh and ah at the robots, and of course, serve as moving targets. The second and third acts of the film are much more explosive, and they serve well to pump testosterone through the hearts of teenagers (and eternal teenagers) everywhere. Now if you’re not a teenage boy (or a boy trapped in a man’s body) that’s ready to check their brain and any semblance of plausibility at the door, then stay far, far away from Transformers. The rest of us can have a good time. There are plenty of us out there who grew up with the Transformers, which is what Dreamworks is counting on. This movie brings them to life like only Michael Bay can, with enough decibels to deafen a boom box. That is, unless the boom box is a transformer. Oh, there’s that too. (7/10) About David W. Shelton
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I’ve never been so angry after seeing a movie. I really, really wanted to hate Transformers. I was ready to pan it with every negative word I could muster. After all, it’s a Michael Bay film. Pearl Harbor was bad beyond imagination. The Island was best left undiscovered. And Armageddon was well, a big mess.
Posts by David W. Shelton are copyright (c)2006, 2007, 2008 by the author. All rights reserved.
David W. Shelton is a writer, speaker and activist in Clarksville, and serves on the Clarksville Human Relations Commission. His passions include film and complete equality for all people, and he has worked in various capacities to work toward this goal. He is currently an illustrator, graphic designer, trainer, and is the owner of Imagine Media Solutions. He is an Adobe® Certified Instructor in Photoshop®.
