Transformers
Michael Bay, 2007
Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, Jon Voight, Peter Cullen
Brief Summary: Autobots wage their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons
Less Brief Summary: Transformers is a touching story of a socially awkward boy who manages to snag the girl of his dreams against a backdrop of chaos, and the touching story of a soldier in the middle east struggling to survive overwhelming odds to make it back home to his loving wife and the daughter he hasn’t yet met.
Oh, and it’s got giant robots in it.
I went to see Transformers last night on the assumption that, this being Michael Bay, it would be a big, beautiful mess: a lot of flashy and exciting and visually impressive action sequences, linked together with a nonsensical and very think spackling of plot.
As it turned out, I had it exactly backwards.
For some reason, the thing that they did, despite it being really obvious, did not occur to me until about the second scene of the film, when we first meet Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf): It is hard to make a successful mainstream movie that is “about” giant CGI robots — the fans would hate it because of all the things they got “wrong” (Megatron is an alien spaceship, not a Walther P38. Now, Megatron hasn’t been a gun since the end of the original series, what with it being a really bad idea to sell a realistic replica of a gun to children to play with. And, I suppose the fact that Megatron no longer violates the law of conservation of matter quite so blatantly soothes my inner geek), and non-fans wouldn’t like it because it was, well, about giant CGI robots. So what they did instead was to make this a movie with giant CGI robots, not about giant CGI robots.
Transformers is not a giant fighting robot movie. It’s not even quite a monster movie, with the thin veneer of plot encasing a story in which Godzilla really is the star. Transformers is a disaster movie. It’s a story about a small band of people struggling to survive under fire from a barely-comprehensible menace from space which spits destruction indescriminantly and against which mankind is essentially powerless.
In point of fact, I was reminded of nothing so much as Deep Impact (Some would say that Armageddon is a closer fit, being another Bay big-flashy-lights-and-splosions feast, but Transformers is much more about the human drama than Armageddon). In fact, we’ve even got a “meteor” strike as the protoform Autobots crash to Earth.
And since here there be spoilers, you’d better wait until after the jump…

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