Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre into the realms of excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars
In 2007, we received the big screen treatment of the of the Transformers franchise courtesy of over-the-top blockbuster purveyor Michael Bay. Anybody with even limited exposure to the original cartoon series knows that the story gives us two factions of robots who can transform themselves into various pieces of machinery, typically vehicles. The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, are the good Transformers. And the Decepticons, led by Megatron, are the evil ones. These two opposite factions of machine-people are at war and they come to Earth and end up involving the human race in their dispute. I don’t know that you need much more explanation than that. That pretty much summarizes the various incarnations of the animated series as well as Michael Bay’s live-action movie reboot.
I have to admit that I was never a big fan of the cartoon series in any form (though I did enjoy what I watched of the CGI-animated Beast Wars series which diverged some from the formula mentioned above). The original series was just too simplistic, good robots vs. bad robots with cute kids hanging around and cliché-ridden kid-friendly plots. And it was shortly after the Transformers debuted that Robotech started to air in syndication and that was where it was at for any true sci fi fan! In any case, the Transformers series lasted for several years and developed a strong following that would lead to several sequel series in the years that followed. And the popularity of the characters never died out, eventually prompting Bay to take the franchise to the big screen.
It seems kind of pointless for me to argue that the movie did not measure up to its source material as I did with my recent review of the Fantastic Four films. The Transformers cartoons in all of their incarnations were pretty simplistic and primarily designed to sell toys. And really, that seems like the perfect fit for the big screen, with Michael Bay did everything required for a seamless transition. He upped the age-level of the central characters to give the film more than just kiddie-appeal , but he didn’t age them too far so that the younger viewers could still relate. And the CGI team did an excellent job of bringing the transforming robots to life, staying mostly faithful to how they looked in their animated incarnations (if only they could have done the same with Galactus . . . ) And there’s not much depth or intricacy to the basic storyline, so even though the writers made changes to that, it’s not like they reduced the dramatic impact of the tale.
I guess my real complaint with this one is the Michael Bay took a pretty much by-the-numbers approach and followed in the vein of other big, dumb blockbusters that had preceded like the Fantastic Four films, the later X-Men and Spider-Man films, and even Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. The movie played off its name-brand recognition to draw people into the theaters, and it delivered an action-packed film that provided adequate popcorn viewing, but nothing more than that. In contrast, the previous Transformers big screen appearance, the animated movie that came out in 1986 was far superior story-wise. I didn’t even care for the cartoon series, but I remembered enjoying that movie as sort of a surreal twist on the show with elements that appealed to adults and children alike.
I would not call Michael Bay’s Transformers a bad movie. It’s just not particularly very good. Not that you really expect that much from a film about robots that can transform into a Camaro or a Peterbilt cab, but they could have given us something here like the 1986 movie did. Instead it followed and perhaps even solidified the sci fi blockbuster template of the past ten to fifteen years, delivering a film high on special effects overload and low on script intelligence or innovation and ultimately fell just short of the guilty pleasure threshold to end up delivering a mostly mind-numbing movie experience.
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