Transformers
Directed by Michael Bay
Many people wondered why Michael Bay’s The Rock was made into a Criterion DVD. Was there some art to his bombast that they had failed to appreciate? If so, DVD is not the place to comprehend it. Without big-screen scale and intimidation and shock, Bay’s newest film, Transformers, is just a comic book. As a movie experience interweaving computer graphic robots with live-action human characters, Transformers ALMOST achieves the artistic miracle of saying something about man’s relationship to technology. Bay’s outburst of metal, pyrotechnics and sheer effrontery amounts to a vision, a megaplex embodiment of the possibilities that children invest in toys.
Three storylines converge: the story of an energy cube that falls to Earth after an intergalactic battle between robotic aliens, the Autobots and the Decepticons; a parallel war in the Middle East where American soldiers (Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel) face an unfathomable enemy; and back home in the States where teenager Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) itches for his first car and his first girlfriend. Technological fate brings these characters together.
Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman take time laying out the scheme as if something really epic, truly serious was unfolding. But that’s the same mistake behind validating The Rock as a conventional cinematic allegory. Bay’s wide-eyed certitude that action is all that matters—never mind meaning—gives Transformers undeniable spark.
What makes it less than great, and ultimately disappointing, is the overly familiar structure closely resembling various Spielberg movies (War of the Worlds, Saving Private Ryan, E.T.) that Bay can never fulfill his abstract self. Transformers rocks some amazing green-screen of actors embodying the metamorphosing bots: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, etc. They all have distinct personalities and, as their metal parts reassemble from the guise of trucks, cars and appliances into acrobatic figures that fly, dance and fight using ballistic weaponry, they personify the whims of any Erector Set or Sega-loving kid. Too bad the filmmakers don’t let these bots take over the spectacle.
Sam’s insipid subplot is less urgent than the Iraq War plot; neither gains from the sci-fi metaphor (although the sense of American freedom in both suggests why envious cultures hate us). A used car dealer (Bernie Mac) babbles about “the mysterious connection of man to machine” but that’s not what dazzles the eye. It’s when Optimus Prime holds Sam in the palm of his steel-girder hand; the evocation of King Kong idealizes a Western teen’s technological romance. No mystery, it’s part of a post-industrial, capitalist legacy. (And it’s largely a boy’s thing; Megan Fox and Rachel Taylor play girls adept at computers and engines but they’re cast as Pussycat Doll wet dreams who don’t fully function within this techno utopia.)
When the Transformers explode from common tools into super beings, the kinetic imagery fulfills the surrealism of Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky—if only they had digital. Bay’s advertising eye creates shots that make you stare back, baffled at the intense clarity and depth. A couple of magnificent low-level shots, looking up at the Transformers overhead and traveling alongside their movements is the damnedest thing. One is suspended in awe—a triumph of TV-commercial aesthetics. Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor had shots like this, but they lacked the fantasy context. That is, a context sustaining both dreams and dread. Bay’s desert battle with aliens is as terrifying as Starship Troopers yet, when linked to conflagration in our own streets, lacks Paul Verhoeven’s masterful use of absurdist nightmare. Even Sam’s high school rivalry scenes lack the terrific daydream quality of boys + speed in Joseph Kahn’s Torque.
Interestingly, the Transformers speak the same intergalactic broadcast lingo as the aliens in Joe Dante’s Explorers; like them, ad-man Bay is all about playing back American pop with affection and horror. Transformers never quite articulates that ambivalence, but it’s an authentic American trait.
