Far Less Than Meets the Eye

I have to start this off by noting that I am not a fan of the Michael Bay Transformers movies. While I’ve never been that into Transformers in general (while all my friends were playing with the robots in disguise I was more into the heroes in a half shell), I don’t tend to hold that against anything that comes out from the franchise. I try to give everything a fair shake, and I have, in fact, enjoyed some of the movies that recently came from Paramount and Hasbro. I thought Bumblebee was a legitimately fun movie, and Transformers One just downright awesome. But the series has more misses than hits, and despite it being a $700 Mil Box Office success, for me 2007’s Transformers was a big miss.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see why people like the movie. It’s big, it’s loud, it has all the Bay-splosions you could ever want, all packed in a big, dumb, disaster movie package. It followed on the heels of the late 1990s disaster movie boom (which Bay himself helped to usher in with Armageddon), and it struck right as the superhero boom was starting to take off. This film was in the right place at just the right time (as so often happens with Bay’s movies), and it led to a multi-film series that somehow gave Paramount and Hasbro, for a few brief years, a license to print money. But that doesn’t mean these films are good.

I’ll come out and say it: I think Transformers is a bad movie. Just straight up really bad. That’s because of a whole raft of elements in the film that don’t work. It’s big and loud but the action is hard to follow. It has a ton of characters but most of their plotlines don’t go anywhere. It’s packed with humor that’s so cringe-inducing that you have to wonder how anyone thought it would be funny. It, like many of Bay’s movies, is this weird distillation of his seeming frat bro id (right down to the energy drinks and beer brands prominently featured). None of this works and every time I go back to watch it (which has been twice so far) I legitimately question humanity for making this film, and the resulting series that followed, into one of the biggest event movies of an entire decade.

The film is largely (although not entirely) focused on Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), a high school senior. Sam wants a car so he can look cool, all so he can then try to impress the hot girl he likes, Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox). But his cheap dad, Ron (Kevin Dunn), will only buy him some cheap junker. As it turns out, though, that junker, an old, yellow Camaro, just so happens to really be Bumblebee (Mark Ryan), an Autobot from a distant world, here as part of a force of Transformers sent to find the All Spark.

What is the All Spark? Well, it’s an energy source, a giant cube that can, somehow, power everything on the Transformer’s homeworld, Cybertron, while also being the source of all Transformer life. In the wrong hands, like those of the evil Decepticons and their leader Megatron (Hugo Weaving), it could lead to the devastation of all life on Earth. As it happens, though, Sam is the key to finding the All Spark as his grandfather was an explorer who happened upon the secrets of the device. His old, broken glasses have the markings that would show where the All Spark was buried, and Sam has those glasses. This leads the Autobots to team up with Sam to fight off the Decepticons, retrieve the All Spark, and save all of humanity.

That distillation of the story makes Transformers feel like a cogent and cohesive film when, in reality, it’s anything but. The Sam storyline is maybe an hour or so of the entire runtime, and while it’s the A-plot it’s hard to argue that it’s the “main” plot. That’s because of all the other characters running around, doing their things in the film. There’s a group of U.S. Air Force guys, led by Josh Duhamel's Captain William Lennox and Tyrese Gibson's Sergeant Robert Epps, and these are the first soldiers to see and encounter any of the Decepticons. There’s also a plotline about a security analyst for the DoD, Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor), looking into a strange code that is mysteriously hacking the web. And there’s Sector 7, a super black-ops security agency for the U.S. that has studied the Transformers for some time. And, note, most of this doesn’t really go anywhere.

These characters all show up regularly throughout the film but it’s hard to say they really contribute anything. The Air Force guys, for example, have regular encounters with the bad bots, but that’s only so we can get action beats every ten minutes or so. Their scenes effectively info dump to us things we already knew, or repeat information we’ve already learned, all so that we can keep seeing robot action on screen. Maggie’s storyline is even worse since it’s not just a retread of stuff we’ve already learned, it’s also stupid and implausible. Something hacking the whole web, and then downloading it, all while people watch it happen… it just doesn’t work that way.

In effect, there’s a good hour, maybe hour-and-a-half, that could easily be excised from this film, all so we could focus on the characters and situations that actually matter. Those would, of course, be Sam and the Autobots. And make no mistake, this isn’t just the only plotline in the film that actually matters, it’s also the only good part of the story in general. Despite the crap people give to LeBeouf and Fox, they’re actually pretty good in this film and I like the back and forth chemistry they have on screen. Watching them learn about the Autobots, and then get sucked into the story of saving the world, is legitimately thrilling. I just wish so much of the film was filler crap that doesn’t need to be there.

Do we need to know that the U.S. government is tracking a weird hacking event, or that it ties to the Decepticons, or that they’re here for some reason to get Sam? Not really, not when all of that is distilled down by Bumblebee for us right before the rest of the Autobots, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) included, show up. We don’t have to see the Air Force guys fight the Decepticons repeatedly for the story to work; it’s only there for explosions and a lot of action noise. Nothing outside of Sam and Mikaela matters, but we spend so long on everything else, getting bored by a lot of crap that doesn’t need to be there.

Transformers is two hours and twenty-three minutes long, and it feels absolutely interminable for huge stretches of that run time. Not only could you excise nearly half the plotlines from the film, I absolutely think you should just to make something interesting and cohesive. Because when we focus on Sam, the Autobots, and their fight against the Decepticons, the film finds energy it otherwise lacks during all its other plotlines. Most of the time, this story works.

I say most of the time because, when it does finally come time for robot on robot action, it’s hard as hell to understand anything going on. Most of the robots look the same (at least to someone not deeply in the know about Transformers), and the movie is filmed in a shaky manner only exacerbated by hyper-frenetic cutting that, in the end, makes it hard to see anything going on. It’s a wild, jumbled mess of action and by the end of it I found I couldn’t even focus on anything going on. I just didn’t care about the power slop I was seeing on screen.

Transformers needed an edit. It needed to be trimmed down, pulled back, and reshaped into something watchable. This film is just not watchable. I’ve watched it twice and disliked it both times (even though I went into this film with every hope I could give it a fair shake and walk away happy). I hated my time with this film and I very much hope I never have to watch it again. Transformers can have great movies, they do exist. This 2007 effort is just not one of them, it’s massive Box Office notwithstanding.