Saturday, July 07, 2007

Big, Loud, Colorful and Stupid

I grew up on The Transformers back in the '80s. I had several of the toys and watched the animated "movie" on home video over twenty times. I was well and truly hooked on those toys. When I outgrew them, it was rather abrupt, and I ended up giving away the toys to my younger cousin, something, in retrospect, I regret doing considering that most of them would have been worth a fortune now had I saved them then.

Even as a one-time fan, however, I had little to no expectations of the Transformers live-action feature film when it was announced that Steven Spielberg would be producing it, and less so when Spielberg tapped Michael Bay to direct it.

It wasn't even the fact that I had very little respect for Bay as a filmmaker. My problem with the film, conceptually, was that I wasn't entirely sure it would translate, not just visually, but from a storytelling point of view.

When I saw the trailers, I had a couple of problems with how ungainly the digital robots assembled by Industrial Light and Magic looked. Of course, Bay's lightning-quick cutting style ensured that I didn't get that good a look at them.

Still, I will admit I felt a bit optimistic about some early good reviews I picked up here and there, with even Roger Ebert, a critic with whom I often agree giving the film a thumbs up.

When I finally got to see it in theaters last night, I found, a bit to my dismay, that the concept did not translate very well at all.

First of all, I would like to give ILM their due for an absolutely heroic effort in bringing Hasbro's famous toy line to life. I don't know who signed off on the final designs for the robots, but they do look fantastic onscreen, especially the colorful autobots, both standing still and in the action sequences. Bay's films, for better or worse, work best when they're zooming along at two hundred miles per hour. The man crafts very effective chase sequences, even if that's just about all that he does well.

Another high point of the film for me was Peter Cullen's distinctly gravelly rumble, which brought back wonderful childhood memories, even if his dialogue still sounded somewhat cartoony (more the fault of the scriptwriters than Cullen himself).

Speaking of cartoony, that's the best way I can describe the plot, the script, and most the characterizations involved, not including the CGI robots. I won't even bother with a synopsis here, other than to say that the heroic Autobots came to earth to save humanity from the evil Decepticons. In true Bay fashion, there are a couple of gaping holes in the story that just had me shaking my head throughout the entire third act. The robots look cool, but Bay does nothing to convince me that they could possibly live in the real world, because to this viewer his movie doesn't play with even a semblance of verisimilitude.

This movie's script simply does not stand up to scrutiny, just as it will not stand up, down the line, to accusations of being one big General Motors/toy commercial.

Oh, and I cannot, cannot conclude this review without lamenting how Hugo Weaving was utterly wasted in the role of Megatron, considering (1) his fleeting screen time and (2) the heavy filtration his voice was subjected to, which rendered him completely unrecognizable but for a couple of inflections in his delivery. There are dozens of throwaway voice actors they could have hired for this tiny role, even if cartoon series original Frank Welker sounds too old by now. A throwaway role deserves a throwaway actor.

Overall, this movie looks cool, and that's pretty much the only good thing I can say about it.

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