Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Transformers / USA / 2007

Michael Bay and his visual effects wizards managed to do something I thought I’d never see in my lifetime: create Decepticons that transform from vehicles into walking piles of garbage. Megatron, Starscream, and the whole crew of bad guys look like vertical landfills with pairs of bright red or blue eyes sticking out of them. The Autobots look better, mostly because they aren’t colored various shades of brown like the Decepticons, and therefore are possible to tell apart from one another. Across the board, however, the essential coolness of Transformers shapeshifting from vehicles or objects into robots with clearly defined limbs and smooth surfaces has completely gone out the window. Bay’s Transformers change from vehicles and objects into robots that look like the same vehicle or object if it were on the verge of falling apart. Maybe this is Bay being “meta,” because Transformers storyline is garbage, even by Bay’s personally low narrative standards.

Bumblebee outacts every human in sight, Bay’s hard-on for the military is so big it can no longer be covered up by bending his knees and holding a binder over his lap, and he has basically destroyed the compartment in many twenty- and thirty-something’s brains that hold pleasant childhood memories of giant, brightly colored Autobots and Decepticons beating the crap out of each other on ocean oil rigs, electric plant roofs, and wherever else energon cubes could be filled up. The great thing about the t.v. series was that its creators realized there was no need whatsoever for character development on the human side of things. Autbots vs. Decepticons was the main event, and it was a great main event. Every week, Megatron could barely keep his crew from turning on him, while the Autobots seemed just a little too fragile for the task at hand. Michael Bay was indeed born to direct the adaptation of an ’80s cartoon/toyline, but he picked the wrong one. G.I. Joe is the movie Bay should make next.

The hardest part in saying all of this is that I’m a huge fan of both The Rock and The Island, but even I can’t bring myself to defend Bay when he messes up this badly.

Adam’s thoughts

by Jason Woloski | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
07 Jul 2007 1:42 PM | Submit Comment