Adolescent again, and loving it
Transformers, the movie, brims, overflows, bursts at the seams with male adolescent giddiness. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The filmmakers take a gee-whiz approach to what is essentially a pretty ridiculous story. The source material is the cheesy kitsch of the ‘80s TV cartoon, and the filmmakers update it to the present with no apologies. This doesn’t mean they try to make sense of it all. With a story like this — shape-changing robots from another planet who call themselves Autobots (the good guys) battling Decepticons (the nasty ones) — how can you?
It’s as laughable as it gets — the robots come from another planet that they’ve destroyed because of an unending civil war; and there’s this shiny cube floating in space with powerful properties that has managed to wend its way, curiously enough, through the vastness of space to find Earth and lodge itself deep into the ice of the North Pole. I forget the details of the cartoon, which I remember watching with some regularity in my teenage years, but I don’t think it involved such shiny geometric objects hurtling through space. (And didn’t Star Trek already do the shiny-metallic-cube thing with the Borg?) On top of the thin-as-ice story is the flimsiest veneer of scientific plausibility. (All those experts at the US Department of Defense typing away at their computers has got to mean something, after all.) Over this feeble base is a massive slathering of teenage hormones on a serious sugar high.
One reason the film works, though, is that it pokes fun at its own nuttiness. There’s a scene in which the good ‘bots go over to the protagonist’s house but try to make themselves inconspicuous. At one point, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, tells his charges, “Hide!” Then there’s the hilarious visual joke of these massive machines trying desperately to be inconspicuous. The Bernie Mac cameo is also a scream. And did John Turturro have a good time making this movie or what?
Another sure sign that the film was spawned by a male brain is the treatment of the female lead, Megan Fox. When she opens the hood of the Camaro and stretches her taut figure over it, the point really is just to give the viewers the chance to gawk — and boy, do we gawk! The sound of jaws hitting the floor filled the movie house — at her pure hotness. Elsewhere in the film she provides the requisite gratuitous cleavage, an essential element of films of this nature.
As for technique, director Michael Bay isn’t exactly the poster boy for subtlety. Is there a movie that has overused the person-standing-against-the-sun shot as much as this one? At least there aren’t any pilots walking toward the camera in slow motion, a stirring anthem on the soundtrack. But then, Bay already did that to death in Armageddon. Plus he has no compunction about sacrificing coherence to excitement. (Remember the space shuttle scene in Armageddon? All that running around, but from where to where you have no idea.) I sometimes didn’t understand who was shooting at what, in what direction someone came from, or where he or she was going. The frenetic editing didn’t help.
Bay may be the wrong director for a serious movie because he just can’t go beyond surfaces. But if ogling surfaces is all you want, then he’s your man. And my, what surfaces! Just as in another adolescent wet dream of a movie, The Fast and the Furious (by Rob Cohen), the machines are far more interesting than the humans. Bay makes the sight of cars careening down smooth asphalt roads the coolest thing, and it seems a shame he has to insert human characters into the story to give it, well, a story. (Which explains the casting of Ms. Fox and that hot blonde as the young woman whose brilliance is unappreciated at the Defense Department — since we can’t avoid having real live people, might as well have some who are easy on the eye.) As it unfolds, the film hits a few lulls. But when the machines take center stage — say, a plane strafing the scorpion-like robot in the sand, Optimus and a baddie duking it out ‘bot to ‘bot on a highway, the climactic scene in which the carnage hits its peak — the movie revels in being all it wants to be: a giddy, guilt-free return to unadulterated male adolescence.
It’s not a masterpiece, but it works just fine. As I walked out of the theater, the adolescent part of my self, which still exists somewhere below layers and layers of encrustations, brimmed with gratitude.
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