Roll Out! More Transformers thoughts...

Due to reasons both professional and personal, it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to the blog---which is a shame, because I’ve seen a slew of interesting films over the last couple of weeks that I’m dying to write about. Hopefully things will slow down a little and I can dedicate some time to catching up, but until then I’ve decided that-since I devoted a post earlier addressing how worried I was about the just-released Transformers feature film-I should follow up with some thoughts now that I’ve actually seen the thing. For a more formal review, check out H-Dogg’s assessment found here.

In short, I echo the earlier review in feeling that it’s far from a Phantom Menace level disaster (though some bodily fluid humor skirted that line a little closely)—but find it not quite a classic. To be honest, though, I shouldn’t have and couldn’t possibly have expected it to be anything more than a product of the Hollywood blockbuster machine---proven formulas (ordinary meeting extraordinary, disparate protagonists rallying together for a common good, occasionally juvenile humor, things blowing up) utilized to make a film that’s designed to be liked by the largest audience possible. The film couldn’t exist any other way: it takes a lot of cash to create spectacle, and since Transformers as a franchise is by nature tied to its merchandise (the beloved mythology was created in it’s entirety to sell toys) it only makes sense that this iteration of the franchise be equally marketable.

I realize this all doesn’t quite sound like a compliment---but it’s not intended exactly as a slam either. Transformers succeeds as a perfectly fine summer time-waster---the crowd pleaser that the majority of this season’s 3quels failed to be. It brings out the thirteen year old boy in all of us. When this boy was around thirteen, the big summer movie was Independence Day---and while I watch that film now and see mainly the flaws, at the time it felt like the coolest film I’d ever seen. Transformers feels like that now---robot on robot action is as big of a Hollywood spectacle as I can imagine. However, as the years go by and flashier films come and go, the jive-talking Autobots, eye-rolling product placement (I can live with the GM endorsements…but that Mountain Dew/X-Box sequence was unforgivable), and plot holes one could fly Astrotrain through will become more and more distracting.

Spider-Man 3 divided audiences earlier this summer, and while that film is certainly flawed, it at the very least had a distinct director’s influence (Sam Raimi’s loopy sense of humor) behind it and was willing to take chances (that didn’t always work). Bay’s Transformers, while far and away the director’s best film, continues to reveal that Bay-while full of visual flair-isn’t an auteur (unless his artistic vision is to make the most commercial film possible and making lots of money). The film went out of its way to not step on any toes (other than those still upset at Prime having lips).

These criticisms are all from the film geek side of me, the Transformers nerd was just thrilled to see these characters brought to the screen. Sure, I wish the Decepticons (mainly Starscream) were given more screen time and that Bumblebee didn’t piss on John Turturro----but it was a freaking live-action Transformers movie!!!! It’s something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my lifetime. I’ll forgive that it reminded me too often of 1998s Godzilla in its mindless largeness, and let it entertain me—like a summer blockbuster should. If I were to rate it: 7/10