TRANSFORMERS Review

Two things that should not be placed in close proximity of each other: Michael Bay and camera. It is almost unthinkable that anyone could make a boring movie of Transformers. But that’s just what Bay has done.

Transformers is mind-numbingly boring, consisting largely of many, many minutes of annoying humans talking and talking and talking and … yes, you wish the Autobots would just break their self-imposed rule of not killing humans and just pulverize these puny beings on screen.

It’s a big mistake to make the humans the main characters of the story. We all know how Bay is with characters – caricatures at best, racial stereotypes at worst. And that’s what we get here. Quite a few racial stereotypes and a bunch of bad actors hamming it up for no good reason, while Bay tries to inject extremely lame comedy into the scenes which are supposed to "establish" the characters.

We came to see the robots, Michael Bay, so give us the fucking robots!

But no, he teases us with a few transformations, glimpses here and there. And when the big moment finally comes – the arrival of the Autobots – we get … more talking with the puny humans!

But later, we come to understand why this is so. It’s a story that gives humanity too much credit, that despite our tendencies for great destruction, we’re also very capable of great heroism. Right. And in the absolute worst moments of the film, it takes shots at the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians, and goes for Bush-friendly lines like "Freedom is the right of every sentient being" or something to that effect. Not surprising, since this is the guy who made the awful Bad Boys II, which has its ending in, of all places, Guantanamo.

And the action? I’m tempted to say "What action?" Nothing really happens until the last moments of the film, and the action is the usual disappointing bunch of blurry, shaky nonsense done further damage by choppy, steroid-enhanced editing. We came to see robots fight, but Bay gives us an absolute auto-wreck in which it’s hard to distinguish just who’s fighting who, or even what’s exactly happening on screen. But by the last half hour, my brain had gone into auto-pilot and my eyes had given up trying to follow the messy action. You can also fault that on the over-designed robots.

At this point I must quote John Boorman, who coined the term "new brutalism" to contrast the new kind of action sequences that we now see much too often, consisting of fast cuts and action going out of frame, with the more classical style of action. In fact, I think if you were to time the action sequences in Transformers, each cut probably doesn’t last more than 1.5 seconds.

It was Boorman who said the new brutalism "is a form of naivete, because it’s made by people who I think don’t really have a grasp of cinema’s history. It’s the MTV kind of editing, where the main idea is that the more disorienting it is, the more exciting. And you see it creeping into mainstream cinema more and more. You look at something like Armageddon and you see all the things that would have been forbidden in classical cinema, like crossing the line, camera jumping from side to side. It is a way to artificially generate excitement but it doesn’t really have any basis to it. And I find it kind of sad, because it’s like an old man trying to dress like a teenager."

I couldn’t agree more.

This is a case of the trailer being much better than the film, and promising much more than what is delivered by the actual film. Bay should have learned something from the original cartoon series or even the animated film, at least in regard to what should be the focus of the story. Instead, he’s much too busy orchestrating military action and trying to make Jon Voight be in his most official and most Rumsfeld, while completely wasting a great talent like John Turturro. But then again, Bay has never been good with characterization and actors anyway.

Maybe Bay should just stick to making military recruitment videos, since he’s so adept at magic-hour shots of military aircraft and personnel, moving in slow-motion or otherwise, making it all look so cool and stylish. There are so many of these shots in the movie that you might just begin to wonder if some of them are stock footage or scenes cut out from his other films that are recycled here. Even when it’s totally unnecessary, he slips some in with pulsing, official-sounding music.

Let’s face it, Michael Bay is cliché, and cliché is Michael Bay. And what we have here is a cliché-ridden adaptation of one of the most beloved cartoon series that misplaces its concerns and completely squanders what could have been a timely live-action revival for Optimus Prime and gang. Instead, we get a yawn-inducing and overlong meditation on how great humanity is, so much so that powerful alien robots think we’re so worth saving that they’re ready to put their lives on the line for us.