Michael Bay is perhaps the exemplary Hollywood director. His films lack any individual artistic personality: they are purées of oft-seen storylines and techniques, with added explosions. Bay’s Bad Boys and its sequel were slam-bang cop action, and his Pearl Harbor was sentimental propaganda. The Island, about clones, was going as high-concept but was in fact high-cliché.
Flashy action is certainly Bay’s forte, and Transformers delivers on that — mostly. This tale of warring robots from outer space who fight it out on Earth has distinct echoes of The Terminator, RoboCop, TV’s Knight Rider and even the animated Cars. Add a magic cube thingy as the MacGuffin and you have something approaching a plot.
In the main storyline, young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf, who did such good work in Holes) is buying his first car — and a wonderful car it will be, like the good Terminator sent to save humanity. For there are good robots and bad robots. For easy reference, the good robots are called Autobots and the bad ones are called Decepticons. The biggest and baddest of them, who looks like a Boccioni sculpture come to life, is Lord Megatron to his inhuman minions and sounds very like Darth Vader. In fact, all the robots sound like James Earl Jones doing his Darth Vader voice.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defence John Voight is trying to work out what the hell is going on and get some defences going. He is aided in this by a brilliant signals analyst who also happens to be a blonde babe. What is least believeable about this plotline, though, is that when the secretary enters an auditorium to brief his youthful analysts, one of them reacts with awe. In today’s United States, it’s hard to imagine a secretary of defence being treated with anything but derision.
There is much in Transformers to make one laugh, and not all of it is intentional. That some of the humour is actually implanted in the script is a good sign and LaBoeuf in particular rises to the occasion. John Turturro lends a hand in that respect, too. The action is okay, though because the target audience here is on the young side, the violence must be bloodless (expect for the odd aesthetically placed scratch). There are explosions galore and chunks of buildings go flying, but, as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, no one gets hurt. This rather takes the edge off the thrills.
The shape-shifting robots are impressive examples of computer-generated imagery. But they have clearly been conceived with an eye on the action-toy market and the good ones at least are just too cutesy. They also make ponderous pronouncements about the future of humanity, as intelligences from outer space are wont to do. They find some good in us — hooray!
Transformers is undeniably silly, but it is fun. If it takes too long to get to the real action, and if some plot elements (like the blonde babe’s role) are underdeveloped, don’t worry. I’m sure Transformers II will be along soon enough.