Happy 4th of July, Autobots!

I love your United States of America! With your Albert Einstein and your Rosa Parks and your Michael Jordan and your HBO! Hell yeah!
I was reluctant to join Pearce for the Transformers movie, so he called my bluff and said he’d pay for the tickets. So that was how I marked July 4. It wasn’t so inappropriate – the truck dude is all Red, White and Blue, and there are rockets red glaring and bombs bursting in the air and such.
Anyway, if you’ve listened to the rather amazed chatter, you’ve already heard that the Transformers movie isn’t so bad. This is true. It is quite entertaining. It may be the second-best movie based on an 80s toy franchise.* I can confirm that it has some snappy dialogue, an acceptable teen-romance angle, neat comedy, and giant robots blowing up lots of stuff. I can also confirm that it makes not the remotest bit of sense and takes place in an alternate universe where they siphoned all the common sense out of everyone and then burned it to make endless, beautiful sunsets.
(There is also an entire plotline, about a quarter of the movie, that should have been cut. It mostly involves a sexy Aussie genius not eating donuts while Dick Cheney orders scientists about, and its about as much fun as that sounds.)
But aside from all that, I just want to say this about the director Michael Bay: he gets everything wrong. Everything. In some future time, his work will be studied as a masterclass in failure. Dude just can’t tell a story using words and images, which is kind of a problem. It is frequently impossible to understand what is happening – where the characters are, what they are doing, where they are moving and why. One “dramatic” chase scene went:
*mid-shot of teenager running*
*mid-shot of robot moving*
*mid-shot of teenager running*
*long shot of sunset*
*mid-shot of robot moving*
Huh? What? Who’s chasing who now? The fight scenes are even worse. Everything is shot in mid-range with this frustrating roving camera and cuts every second (literally, every single second). It’s just metal bits wrangling other metal bits at insanely high speed, and then an explosion or someone running through the frame screaming. On and on and on.
And as for those iconic robots themselves, the franchise heroes – only one of them gets any kind of decent reveal, and that’s within the first five minutes of the movie. The first appearances of all the rest are just dull. A lot of the time they just turn up in frame and a-ha! He’s a truck! Cutaway now!
As cinematic storytelling, it is an unmitigated disaster. There is no value or meaning in the sequence of images, there is no way to transform the cuts you see into a coherent scene without thinking hard and using clues in dialogue or inferring backwards from outcomes. The dude can’t direct AT ALL.
So, my recommendation: don’t see it, unless you really like transforming robots, or Pearce buys your ticket. It isn’t bad – Ebert gave it three stars, even – but, man, I’ve only been home 30 minutes and already the whole experience is evaporating like mist in the morning. Just not worth it.
* Frank Langella as Skeletor. Just sayin’.

13 thoughts on “Happy 4th of July, Autobots!”

  1. damn it – i really really really want to see it and i wasn’t ever hooked on transformers. I want to hear what Chris and Dean have to say – but that is as unlikely as Michael Bay proving to you he’s not a failure.
    in any case i have to wait till the end of the month to see it. so i’m off to Die Hard 4.0 in the meanwhile… sure hope that is yippie-kay-aye mother trucking good! well you know crap, but enjoyably good!

  2. You will enjoy Transformers, much as I did. But try and see it at a cheap session. The Michael Bay suckitude is an interference, not a dealbreaker – there is clearly awesome stuff happening, you just wish you could see it.

  4. So it sounds like, on a deep down, primitive testosteronal level, you enjoyed it; but at an intellectual and critical level, you found the whole film utterly insulting and appalling. So definitely a “brains off” movie.
    Couldn’t agree more – especially about Aussie decoder ring chick and that whole bit of story. I had almost totally forgotten that part – though the memory of a brief glimpse of Buffy’s Andrew is the only real reason to recall any of it…

  5. I DID completely forget about that subplot, which is why I made no mention of it in my post. Agreed, entirely jettisonable.

  6. I admire your bravery, M.
    Because I’ve found that criticism of the golden child, the saviour of modern cinema, the man who brings the “move” to movies, Mr Michael Bay tends to attract criticism from people who really should know better.
    Like you, I just can’t stand him. He simply cannot tell a story in the medium he’s decided to work in. It’s more than the stereotypical “ooh, look, there’s a plot hole, fill it with a helicopter exploding!” It’s that he strings together his high-speed cuts of violence, movement and fire with completely no coherency or story-telling point.
    I’ll no longer even entertain watching one of his movies, so I won’t be checking this film out.
    You know what I’d like to see?
    Uwe Boll, Paul W. S. Anderson and Michael Bay in a death match. Filmed by two helicopters and three steadicams and a hand-held DV camera, edited together by nine ADHD chimps who have not been given their ritalin.

  7. Hmmm, sounds like a movie to give a miss too, I was trying to work out what Michael Bay movies I’d seen and realized that there was only Bad Boys (which I liked) and Bad Boys 2 which sucked. Searching IMDB pretty much everything else he’s done is re-makes that I haven’t bothered to watch.

  9. Ooh, Harry Potter!
    It is possible to enjoy Transformers. Heck, I did enjoy it. You just need to weather the storm of suck that is Michael Bay’s directorial “style”.
    I was thinking just the other day “must ask T about that”. Now I can’t remember what it was that I was thinking about. Hmm.

  10. Can’t wait for HP. Book five is mt favourite and I have this hope that the movie is going to be too. If it is I’ll be heading to our oh-so-distant – a desperate 200yd dash – every day for a week!
    Let me know if the lightbulb re-ignites!

  11. “Because I’ve found that criticism of the golden child, the saviour of modern cinema, the man who brings the “move” to movies, Mr Michael Bay tends to attract criticism from people who really should know better.”
    *REALLY*? The mind truly boggles. You have to start hanging out with a better class of person, methinks.

  12. Do you think it says rather a lot about the demographic of the people who peruse this blog Morgue, that your post on Transformers received 11, no, 12 comments; while the post on those attacks in Scotland attracted a mere 3? I think so! Or is there more to this than meets the eye? Boom boom.
    Tongue in cheek and all of that,
    M@

  13. We Gen-Xers take our Transformers VERY seriously.
    (I remember where I was when I saw Optimus Prime for the first time. Not kidding.)

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