Cinema Hype

I used to watch the Transformers cartoon when I was a little girl. I would get up every summer morning and join my brother in the living room for Transformers and then G.I. Joe. I watched them not because I cared about alien robots that changed into cars–I would definitely have preferred Muppet Babies, or pretty much anything else, really–but because they were there, and that was what we did in the morning. I remember watching the show, but very little about what actually happened onscreen.

Twenty years later, seeing the Transformers movie brought back that feeling. I had actually been fairly excited about the movie–I am, after all, a part of that golden generation that experienced Transformers in its native decade, and I do love a good bad movie now and then. I’m all for CGI violence, and I support the cause of ILM working their best magic. Bring on the OK Corral, robot-style! Sadly, sitting in the theater with the actual film, I realized that my six-year-old self had been right: I don’t really care. What’s worse, I didn’t get the feeling that anybody involved in the movie cared whether I cared.

Not everything about Transformers is disappointing. John Turturro’s in it, which ensures a certain baseline level of awesome. Shia LaBoeuf makes a fun hero, and looks like he may skip the embarrassing Christina Ricci “no longer a girl, not yet a woman” stage and grow into a convincing adult actor. The Transformers themselves–Autobots and Decepticons, if we’re being technical–are pretty impressive, and I totally want a car like Bumblebee (after I’ve parted ways with my beloved Fabio, the wonder-Golf, obviously). It’s attractively shot, and some of the chase scenes are pretty fun, which is (not to mix my 80s cartoons) half the battle. (Oy. I’m sorry about that.)

But that’s kind of where things end. For one thing, watching two robot cars fight it out is hard to watch from a visual standpoint; everything’s gray and shiny and crunchy, and it all blends together. Who’s doing what to whom becomes less clear, and then I start zoning out and miss what are probably the good parts anyway. More important, though, is that automotive violence is hard to get worked up about–grease and wiper fluid don’t compare with blood. Sure, we like Optimus Prime and his ragtag band of automotive automatons, but they can’t carry the emotional core of the movie, and shouldn’t be expected to. The human-human relationships aren’t much better; everything’s pretty cursory for poor Sam Witwicky and everyone around him. There’s even an Australian programmer chick (inexplicably working for the NSA) whose storyline just….ends. Surely the deleted scenes will give us something more to work with? It’s not that anybody went into the theater expecting an in-depth analysis of interpersonal relationships, but just a bit more concerted effort on that front might have made an enormous difference in the feel of the movie. After all, blockbusters don’t have to be crappy. Have we learned nothing from Christopher ‘I singlehandedly revived the Batman franchise’ Nolan?

There was also a whole path that director Michael Bay could have taken with Transformers and didn’t. I’m talking about 80s irony, which might have been over the heads of the whippersnappers today, but also might have made the movie less awkward–it’s okay to be crappy if you’re doing it on purpose, or at least able to own up to the fact. The movie as it stands wasn’t quite able to laugh at itself, which gave it a strange kind of Armageddon-esque quality that didn’t come across well and is likely to age particularly badly. I personally think a Transformers movie set in the 80s might have been fun, especially if Bay walked the fine line between “serious” action film and true camp. One could argue that 80s technology would have limited the story, but hey, if it worked for our interstellar heroes twenty years ago, who are we to complain?

So that’s what happened with Transformers: I relived a bit of my youth and realized that it’s not much more exciting now than it was then. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could say that the movie had–wait for it–more than meets the eye? I wish I could say that. But I can’t, because what we see here is exactly what we get.

Transformers, Shia LeBoeuf, movie reviews, 80’s cartoons