Transformers

2007 **1/2

So I got all excited for Transformers for about two weeks, as I mentioned in this post.

(Rereading that post, I was disappointed to notice that when I was listing all the examples of cinematic big robot fights I forgot all about Robocops 1 and 2. I'm also disappointed in all of you for missing it. A pall of shame is on us all. Okay, it's gone!)

I'm sorry to say Transformers didn't deliver any of the transcendant action moments I was hoping for. Mostly it had to do with Michael Bay.

I gripe a lot about the specific delivery modes of action movies. There's a lot to complain about. Batman Forever is my old critical standby, because the fight scenes are a cheat of quick cuts and blurry closeups -- a trick that shows up in movies constantly. There's the old Shaky Cam trick, which dominates Blair Witch and shows up in Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane and lots of other places. There's Uwe Boll's overuse of springboards while he's not noticing that the dudes in the background don't have anything to do.

Examples of excellent fight narrative would be: the big fight in Kill Bill Volume 1, any fight scene in the Matrix trilogy or that scene in King Kong when Kong, Naomi and a couple of T-rexes are hanging from those vines. The difference is instantly spottable, because it's the basic answer to "do you know what's going on?" It's like whether you can understand a song's lyrics or not.

Fight scenes don't have to be technically perfect to work; I do have room for technique, I just don't like laziness disguised as technique, which is what you usually get. Batman Begins has fight scenes about as clear as Batman Forever, but put simply, Nolan's cool, Shumacher sucks.

The thing about Michael Bay is that he doesn't totally suck, but he doesn't understand action narrative like I want him to, either. There's a little good stuff in Transformers, mixed with some Batman Forever and Shaky Cam, and too much repitition. Watching Transformers I had a hard time faulting him, because I got the strange impression that he genuinely liked his stuff. I saw him in a screening room saying "now have a rocket launcher pop out of the Decepticon's shoulder and fire a barrage at our heroes!" And the tech guys says "uh, again?" and Bay genially says "of course!" not surprised the guy doesn't understand his genius. Then he leans back in his chair and shakes his head a little and says "oh, man, they're gonna love this!"

So this year I'm being told that what I can't get enough of is a huge movie screen in front of me displaying CG machine parts. Because that's what you get plenty of, big reeling shots while the camera plays across the surface of a robot while he transforms or fights. The complexity of the robots' design actually plays into the visual confusion that fills this whole movie. Every time a robot transforms, there's so many steps to the switch that it seemed like each bot had a middle form quite different from both their beginning and ending forms, which felt like a cheat. As the number of Transformers increases, so does the basic unreality seeping through this movie, leaking out of the inescapable premise that this is a live-action movie based on a cartoon based on a toy line.

I guess I don't have to hate Shia Labeouf, I don't know. He does a decent job grounding the a story that's hard to take very seriously at all. My favorite stupid bit is when he finds out his romantic interest has (gulp) a police record! That his character moralizes about this at all tells you where this script is coming from; in real life such news wouldn't matter because 1) she's incredibly hot and 2) a police record just makes her hotter. Duh.

There are some frustrating slow spots, like the scene in which Shia is inexplicably trying to hide his giant robot friends from his parents, instead of saying "Look! Giant alien robots! I've got stuff going on here! Fuck off!" That's about in tune with the frustration you'll feel waiting to see something really cool, instead of just kind of cool.

So I'm still going to go with Robocop 2 as my favorite movie fight involving a big-ass robot. I wanted Transformers to knock it out of the park, but it didn't quite deliver. It may actually be easier to tell what's going on during those action scenes if you're watching this on a small screen.

"I'm gonna smash throught that bus, and amazingly make it not that cool!"