Transformers (2007): Loud and Pointless Bay Mayhem

Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie is a loud, overplotted, and overdone reinvention of a classic media franchise that devoutly worships mid-2000s movie-making cliches. To say that much of what it does is the best Bay’s movies ever got is very dim praise indeed, save a bright male lead in the form of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky. Even Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done, a rock song that became the movie’s de facto anthem, bears little to no relevance to its story, and considering that an awkward high school boy isn’t exactly the type of person who needs to cross out what he’s become is a little bit funny. LaBeouf’s performance as this socially inept high school senior is too good for Bay’s movie, an awkwardly charming lead role that many young men have and will continue to empathize with. LaBeouf injects a movie that mistakes the ingredients of blockbuster filmmaking for the thing itself with a measure of life that otherwise wouldn’t exist, but Bay’s writing and directing don’t do him a lot of favors, and he gets stuck inside a movie that isn’t good enough for him.

Transformers is a media franchise that dates back to 1984, and Bay hopes only to bring it into the modern age. As it turns out, his idea of modernizing a franchise is as cliched as a young, Manhattan-based professional’s idea of life in the Midwest. His world is populated by robots from the far reaches of space, some of whom inexplicably speak with hood accents, as well as beautiful women dressed as if they’re from a Kohl’s catalog placed at random throughout the movie for no other reason than that Bay knew his primary money-maker at the box office would be adolescent boys. Again, LaBeouf helps him out, but the best things about his movie are ironically the ones he isn’t in control of.

Watching it is like watching every blockbuster trope of its era assembled into one movie. It pillages shamelessly from military, action, and comedy movies, and it’s impossible not to think about the movies that inspired it every time you see something like Scorponok chasing a group of US Army Rangers through the Qatar desert. Transformers fails to find a personality to call its own, so it settles for rampant product placement and military-hardware-slash-cool-car porn, like Bay is making excuses to include vehicles and products he loves in his movie for no reason other than that he wanted to. Watching it is often like watching a car commercial – when you’re not watching a commercial for everything else – and not in a good way.

Bay incorporates a well-established franchise with the filmmaking clichés of not too long ago, things like American military might, hot and shallow high school girls, and the very different lives these two types of people led. Sam Witwicky is an awkward, likable character at the core of a movie that doesn’t live up to him. A lot of the characters in this movie – everyone from an old, black used-car salesman to a soldier trying to be a dad from an ocean away – are stereotypes, but LaBeouf plays Witwicky with loads of relatable, awkward charm, like you’d expect a high school senior to act in social situations. He wants a car and a girlfriend, but he’s having to deal with such trials as being bad at football and having weird friends who climb trees because they think it makes them look cool to the girls. As for Mikaela, his grease monkey love interest, she isn’t much to write home about, though Sam’s awful – and eventually successful – attempts at flirting with her are extremely amusing. One might wonder why he’s so attracted to someone far less interesting than him in the first place, because any fleeting explorations of her character are soon swallowed up by Bay’s obsession with her body.

Steve Jablonsky’s score is epic but unambitious, and it sounds about right for a movie that speaks so much without seeming to say a whole lot that we haven’t heard before. Transformers is a lot of cliches with only a little bit of thought put into them, but at least it sounds and looks cool. It’s constantly exciting, and I do regret that I wasn’t given much time to let each sight settle in before the next one hit me like the endless bullets and rockets that get fired in this movie. It’s like a constant stream of highlights, cool at first, but prone to tiring when you aren’t given a break from them. One thing’s for sure, though: the visual effects of this movie are outstanding. The general aesthetic of each Autobot (the good guys) and Decepticon (the bad) is something of a visual jumble, but they’re realistically animated to the point where they feel like they take up actual space in the world, even if their aesthetic doesn’t know what it wants to be.

These Autobots and Decepticons hate each other, which leads to many battles in many different locations that feel like obligations for a blockbuster to visit, places like the Hoover Dam and downtown Los Angeles. These action setpieces are epic throwdowns between otherworldly iron giants, but difficult to follow due to their shaky camerawork and cuts that flip between the action almost too quickly for one to keep up. Transformers and its sequels virtually came to define the action movie cliches of the time because of their success, for better and for worse, as if I told you or anyone else that a movie I watched felt like Transformers, you’d immediately understand what I meant. LaBeouf turns a character that was a script obligation into more than that, but it’s not enough to save a movie that thinks something other than him should be the most interesting thing about it.

Transformers and its sequels virtually defined years of bad movie discourse, and what sends it off the rails is Bay knowing the ingredients of a good movie but lacking the finesse to combine them into something narratively edible. His movie is often an assault on the senses, one created almost entirely by artificial means. For as much as gets thrown at the screen, too much of it lacks any weight, like we’re being regaled with a list of the elements that go into making a movie, one after another, without any real cohesion to hold them together and set them in service of some larger goal. This movie demands nothing of you, and it will fool those who aren’t necessarily looking for something from a movie into thinking they’ve gotten it. It does so much and offers so little in return.

Transformers (2007) – 4/10

Amos 1:1-8