Night of the Living Blogpost!

I hate scary movies. I really do.

It’s not that I think they’re predictable, or that they revel in absurd premises, or that they resort to lots of cheap scares, even though all of those things are probably true. No, I hate scary movies because of the simple fact that when I watch them, I get scared really, really easily.

I don’t get scared in the fun way, either, where you react to each scene as it comes and then get over it quickly. No, when I’m sitting in that theater (or much more likely, at home on my sofa, with the remote firmly in hand), I am on red alert, constantly trying to predict the next scary moment, bracing myself every second until it arrives, and then repeating the process all over again. I really have no idea if this is how it works for everyone, but for me it’s emotionally draining and physically uncomfortable, and it happens every single time I try to watch a horror flick. Hell, I almost walked out of This is the End because I was feeling too tense. And that was a comedy starring Darryl from The Office.

So yeah. I hate scary movies.

But I love Halloween.

What? I'm a complex individual. 

Is it paradoxical? Maybe. I’d just say that I prefer spooky to scary. Either way, my holiday spirit is strong enough that I’m willing to put up with a few creature features, if only during the month of October. And really, could there be a better time of the year to bring this blog back from the dead? Don’t answer that.

Today, I’m going to look at a movie that I just watched for the first time, but that’s been on my Netflix queue for over a year. Directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, it’s Dracula.

Now, Dracula is one of my favorite books, and I’ve read it about five times in the last seven years, so I was extremely excited when I heard tell that Coppola’s version was the most faithful adaptation of the story yet to be put on film. Now that I’ve seen it, I’d say that, yeah, that’s about right. It certainly quotes the novel often enough. If nothing else, the main characters are all present and accounted for, and they all play their proper roles in the story, both of those things being surprisingly rare occurrences in Dracula movies.

A quick breakdown of the story’s characters-slash-roles for your benefit-slash-my own personal satisfaction: The first part of Dracula focuses on solicitor Jonathan Harker, who apparently drew the short straw in his office lottery, and ends up having to pay his newest client a visit at his remote Transylvania castle. Once Jonathan’s story peters out, we return to England to meet his fiancée Mina Murray and her best friend Lucy Westenra. Also introduced at this point are the three men that want to marry Lucy: Dr. John Seward, who provides more than half of the narration in the novel but tends to get short-changed on film (this one being no exception); Arthur Holmwood, the most important of the three from a hierarchical standpoint, as well as the one who actually gets the girl; and badass Texan Quincey Morris, who gets… well, something else. Through Seward, we periodically check in on Renfield, a patient at the mental asylum the doctor runs. And last but certainly not least, we have Abraham Van Helsing, who is decidedly not a vampire hunter, but rather Seward’s friend and former teacher, called in to help make sense of things despite being armed only with several PhDs, a reasonable knowledge of the occult, and an open mind.

(On a little bit of a tangent: Keanu Reeves, of all people, plays Jonathan in this movie, and I really want to know… Can the man act? Like, at all? Seriously, has he ever given a genuinely good performance outside of Bill and Ted? Let me know in the comments or through Facebook, because if he has, I’d really like to see it. Help me out, folks.)

Right, so we’re all grounded. Let’s talk about the bloody movie now, eh?

I try really hard not to be that guy when I watch adaptations, pointing out every little difference from the book, because adaptation is a lot more difficult than it seems. Stories rarely transition well from one medium to another, so if you want the story to live up to its fullest potential, you have to make changes to suit the format you’re working in. Compressing certain plot points and skipping over others are a good first step, because books and comics have the luxury of much slower pacing than your average movie. They certainly have slower pacing than your average good movie.

This trilogy will be nine hours long. I’ve read The Hobbit. You know how long it took me? FOUR HOURS.

Condensing the plot is rarely enough, though. For instance, JAWS, which I talked about last time, was also based on a novel, and in adapting it, several characters were cut or drastically reinvented, and multiple storylines got dropped completely. Among them: the Mafia’s intimidation of the Mayor in order to keep the beaches open, because (besides that concept being really silly,) maintaining the Mayor’s agency creates a more personal conflict; and Hooper’s affair with Brody’s wife, because a fight to the death with a great white shark creates more than enough tension for a film’s third act, thank you very much. You have to be willing to shake things up in an adaptation, or else you risk making a crappy movie. It’s as simple as that. Little differences, big differences, I welcome them all, as long as they’re justified.

One little difference in this film that I very much approved of was the decision to give Renfield a backstory. In the novel, Renfield isn’t much more than a lunatic who likes to eat small animals alive, and who is particularly susceptible to Dracula’s influence. In the film, he’s turned into Dracula’s former solicitor, the one Jonathan is replacing at the start of the movie, and it really goes a long way towards explaining how he became crazy and why he has such a strong connection to the Count in the story’s second half. I learned in the research for this blugpost that that choice is really more of an homage to Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, in which the Renfield character actually replaces Jonathan at the castle in the first part of the movie, but either way, giving Renfield a history with vampires puts a nice little bow on that loose end, and strengthens an already really interesting character. There are further attempts made to strengthen other characters in ways that I don’t think are nearly as successful, but I’ll have plenty to say about that after I get the general stuff out of the way.

The appeal of Dracula as a novel comes from the fact that the bulk of its narrative is, for all intents and purposes, a single, long exercise in dramatic irony: Jonathan heads off to Transylvania and goes missing, but of those he leaves behind, only we know the horrific things he witnessed while he was there. A few months later, a ship with a murdered crew washes up in the town of Whitby, filled only with boxes of dirt; we know from Jonathan that Count Dracula was preparing to move to England. Then Lucy starts sleepwalking and gets sick, seemingly from an inexplicable loss of blood, and… well, you get the idea. We aren’t given all the pieces of the puzzle right away, but as they’re doled out, we have the benefit – unlike the characters – of seeing them all in context. The end result is a book that’s almost, but not quite, a mystery, because the reader’s knowledge outpaces the characters’ knowledge just enough that we start itching for them to figure it out.

Such a concept may have worked in 1897, when vampires didn’t pervade the cultural consciousness to an absolutely insane degree. It may have been fascinating, or even terrifying. Nowadays, though, an idea like that, no matter how well it’s executed, just isn’t going to fly, and that development isn’t really anyone’s fault.

But I’m gonna go ahead and blame Stephenie Meyer anyway.

We all know how vampires work now, and because of that, Dracula holds no surprises for us. Even I still have a tendency to sigh with relief after the big reveal is finally reached, and like I said before, I love the book to death.

So no, Dracula’s plotting does not lend itself well to movie form in this day and age. Before we can do anything, something has to be done about all that (now obsolete) exposition. And believe me, there is a LOT of exposition. The book is really mostly exposition. And the writers of this movie will have none of it. They opt take the easy way out, dumping all the information on us at once via Van Helsing, and really trashing his character as a result. Yes, book Van Helsing is also a walking exposition dump, but he gave it out a little bit at a time, and he also got frequent opportunities to spend a page or seven simply waxing philosophical. He’s a great, even funny character, and he’s become the second most important part of the Dracula mythology for a reason. Movie Van Helsing, though, doesn’t have time for your silly nonsense, and that includes ridiculous notions like ‘exploring our options’ or ‘reasonable doubt.’ He simply shows up, sees Lucy’s bite marks, and promptly declares it Vampire Season.

Rabbit Season!

Even Anthony Hopkins (Anthony Hopkins!!) can’t seem to figure out how to play the poor guy, resorting to a kind of grumpy matter-of-factness that is occasionally, in his better moments, tempered by a very grim sense of humor and multiple, inexplicable Exorcist references.

The alternative to this exposition dump in question would have been, in my opinon, to take things in the complete opposite direction: abandon all hope of surprise, and embrace the fact that the audience knows how vampires work, using our knowledge to really build the suspense. Oh, silly me. I forgot to outline what I mean when I use those terms. But I just so happen to have brought someone who can help! Professor?

Van Helsing Says: Thank you, friend Michael. Surprise and suspense, we are all familiar with these things, no? Though the heart race when he feel them, they be not as strangers to us. We think of them as we do the hands that clasp one another. And yet in the execution we see that they be oh! so different. Your so famous director, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, he describe the difference as such: Suppose two men, such as you and myself, we sit here at this table and we chat, about life, about weather, about work, it matters not what. Suddenly, out of nowhere there comes the boom! from beneath the table, and we two are dead. To those observing our chat, they experience the sensation of surprise, for they knew not that this thing would happen, and because of this, they cared not for what we had to say. Now! Suppose instead that those watching, they see the anarchist as he place the bomb beneath our table, and they know that it shall explode at eleven on the clock. How great then will their despair be, to watch us while away our so precious minutes on trivialities? Would they not yearn to reach out, to warn us of our fate that we know not of, even though this thing they cannot do, for I forget to say that in this example we are as mere figures on a screen? In such a case, our every word hold the viewer in his thrall, though our topics be the same, for the audience is caught now in the great web of suspense. You tell me, dear reader at home, which be the better tool of cinema? The surprise of the jump scare, which my dear friend Michael hate so much, or the drama of suspense, which even he, in his woman-like fear of the horror film, must hold in so high a regard?

Ahem. Thank you, Professor, for that very… illuminating lecture. Moving on.

Because we as a culture have such intimate knowledge of a vampire’s bag of tricks, an idealized version of this movie would not only allow us to anticipate Dracula’s every move, but could indicate to us what that move will be with only the slightest of hints or visual cues. The characters would still be able to figure things out, but more slowly and at a pace that makes sense to the story. Really, it wouldn’t matter to us if they figured it out at all, much less explained it out loud for our benefit, because we would already know the lay of the land. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop, we would grow all the more worried for the characters’ safety as they advance further into what we know to be a dangerous situation. (Of course, for that method to succeed, the writers would have to make us like the characters first, a technique that most horror movies have completely given up on. In this case, though, it would be worth the investment, since only two of the seven main characters die.) (No spoilers.) It’s not every day that you hear me wishing that a movie was scarier – again, I point you towards This is the End – but in this instance, I feel that it would have been the right thing to do.

I will remind you, since it seems like forever ago that I explained it, that what the filmmakers actually chose to do was adapt the novel more or less as written, simply moving along at 2x speed. The fallout from that decision is that they have a lot of time to fill, and to my great dismay, they filled this time with an original(?) subplot: a love triangle between Jonathan, Mina, and, yes, the Count.

I don’t know who first came up with the idea that Mina is secretly the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-dead wife. I really don’t. It may or may not have been these writers, because I’ve seen the concept show up in quite a few versions of the story, including the new NBC show, and a similar love triangle is featured in the Broadway musical. Regardless, whoever it was that had the idea, I’d like to punch them.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with invoking sympathy for vampires in fiction. As a Joss Whedon megafan, Angel and Spike immediately spring to mind. I’ll even confess to watching True Blood. (Though I’ll hold off on saying just how much.) In this particular case, I call it a mistake, if only because it ends up confusing the audience. The film should, by all accounts, want us to care about its supposed protagonists, but ends up expending far more effort humanizing the creature they are all risking their lives to kill. There is pity to be had for Count Dracula, to be sure, and evoking it adds a nice depth to the conflict at hand. But that pity should be directed at the man he once was, not the unqualified monster that he is.

There are times when the Mina/Dracula subplot comes across as the only part of the movie the filmmakers cared about at all; if it weren’t for the frequent – and often very impressive – practical SFX that fill the movie, I’d be willing to say so outright. The scenes between the two are long, indulgent, sensual, and surprisingly tender, while other parts of the film are so brusque that they could almost be Dracula Sparknotes read aloud. One gets the sense that the entire project was an excuse to share this one subplot with the world. That, or Francis Ford Coppola REALLY wanted to see Gary Oldman have sex with Winona Ryder.

That last point was a joke, but I almost think that it might be true. After all, it’s not just Drac and Mina; the whole movie is bursting at the seams with depraved sexual overtones. In fact, they’re so blatant that they could very well just be ‘tones.’ Dracula the novel has its fair share of thinly veiled sexual imagery, don’t get me wrong, but this has to be the most sexual version of the story I’ve ever seen.

  

Pictured: Raw sexuality.

WEIRDLY SEXUAL MOMENT CHECKLIST!!

•             Jonathan’s first encounter with the three brides of Dracula very quickly devolves into what I am regrettably forced to call a blood orgy. True, that same scene in the book is absolutely its most overtly sexual moment, but (luckily for Jonathan) nothing actually happens between the four of them, and any eroticism comes solely from the antici……pation of a single bite. Here, we get lots and lots of biting, and it’s all so explicit that it reads only as exploitative.
•            At Hillingham, Mina and Lucy get caught in a rainstorm in a hedge maze, and decide to use this opportunity to make out with each other, because, sure, why not? Mind you, this is well before Dracula shows up. I really can’t justify it at all. Do women kiss each other indiscriminately when they get caught in the rain? Is that a thing? Because if it is, I really wish I’d known about it sooner.
•            It’s not enough for poor Lucy to get bitten by Dracula; she also has to be raped by him in werewolf form. Because that’s how you get turned into a vampire, right guys? Werewolf rape? Come on, don’t look at me like that, this stuff is common knowledge.
•            Book Lucy is found in a ‘swoon’ after a night of being fed on. Movie Lucy reacts with a ten-minute orgasm.
•            *SPOILERS* At the end of the movie, when half-vampirized Mina and Van Helsing are alone outside Dracula’s castle, she makes a half-assed effort to schtupp the good doctor. It’s not as bad as everything else on this list, especially since she was really just going in for a bite, but still. Really? 

Bottom line: The Godfather this ain’t. Hell, it might not even be The Godfather: Part III. (I couldn’t tell you; I’ve never seen that one. Please don’t make me.) However Dracula may have turned out in the end, though, the film was a least made with the intention of doing justice to the original novel, and I’ve got to give it credit for that.

Bottom bottom line: read Dracula! It’s really good! Or you could watch this movie, I guess. It’s okay.

Maybe Keanu was a good choice for a vampire movie after all...

The Head, the Tail, the Whole Damn Thing

SHARK WEEK, BITCHES!!

SHARK WEEK!!

… Ahem.

Hello. As you may be aware, Shark Week is once again upon us. Truthfully, I don’t much care for sharks, or even Shark Week itself, but I thought I’d take advantage of the craze anyway, because as luck would have it, one of my favorite movies of all time just so happens to be shark-based.

That’s right, it’s JAWS time.

Cue music.

I love this movie. I think most people love this movie. When one is asked to deal with this movie, loving it seems to be more or less the correct answer. This is a film that does almost everything right, even if its many issues during production led to a few of those things being done right by accident.

In addition to being the definitive shark movie, JAWS is also responsible for the creation of the summer blockbuster, and as much as I am something of an apologist when it comes to today’s blockbusters, modern-day Hollywood stands to learn a lot from this film. I’ve mentioned a few times now that when you’re looking at story structure, simplicity is not a bad thing, and JAWS really is the ultimate demonstration of that concept. To show what I mean, let’s apply our handy-dandy models.

Plot flow: People want to go swimming, BUT there’s a shark. THEREFORE our hero has to get rid of it. The End.

Hero’s journey: Martin Brody is the chief of police, and he NEEDS to kill the shark, so he GOES, FINDS IT, KILLS IT, and RETURNS. The End.

There’s more to both of those outlines, naturally, but the fact is, that’s more or less what we’re looking at. Nobody is going to sit down to watch JAWS and say that they don’t understand what’s going on. Indeed, the real genius of the film lies in the way that its bare-bones synopsis gets fleshed out to exactly the right degree.

From the get-go, JAWS is a film that needs some way to justify itself. After all, does Brody really need to kill the Shark? There’s a pretty easy alternative:

People want to go swimming, BUT there’s a shark. THEREFORE they don’t. The End.

Sharks are scary, there’s no doubt about that, but they also have a much harder time killing you if you simply get out of the water. Any good shark movie has to work around that fact, and while most address the issue by finding a way to strand their characters in open waters, JAWS embraces the hurdle, filling in the potential plot hole with solid character work.

Sharknado, meanwhile, pole-vaults over it by hurling sharks through the air amidst gale-force winds. To each their own.

As chief of police, Brody does of course have the option to close the beaches right away. In fact, doing so would be a perfectly viable course of action; as oceanographer Matt Hooper explains, cutting off the Shark’s food supply will eventually cause it to leave of its own accord. It would also, however, give us a pretty short movie, and therefore the situation is complicated through other means. In the film’s opening scenes, we learn that Amity Island’s economy is fueled almost entirely by summer tourism. If people can’t come and enjoy the beaches, the whole community suffers for the rest of the year, and the town’s mayor isn’t ready to let that happen. For as long as he can maintain plausible deniability, the Mayor continues coaxing people back into the water, forcing Brody to take a more direct approach if he wants to forestall further loss of life.

I find Mayor Larry Vaughan to be a fascinating character, but in discussing JAWS, he rarely gets the attention he deserves. While he does some reprehensible things, and is punchably smug in several of his appearances, there’s no real sinister intent to what he does. Instead, he operates in a combined state of denial and desperation, doing what he feels he needs to do for the sake of the town. His actions may be irresponsible and morally wrong, but at the same time, it's never that hard to see his side of things. It’s a smart choice, one that adds a substantial amount of character conflict to the film without unseating the Shark as the true antagonistic force.

Character conflict is of the utmost importance in this movie, simply due to the fact that it takes over an hour for Brody, Hooper, and Quint to get out on the water. Without something else to focus on, that time could have come across as the film spinning its wheels, but JAWS is smarter than that. We spend the first hour getting to know the characters and their relationships while simultaneously raising the stakes bit by bit, and as a result, not a minute feels wasted.

It’s become a common punchline to remark that something “escalated quickly,” and I can understand why. When a situation jumps immediately from the mundane to the extreme, especially in fiction, we’re just as likely to laugh as we are to be concerned. I know I am, at any rate. That's why attempts at sudden shock, or diving headlong into action, risk falling flat. Once again, almost everything in filmmaking works on a case-by-case basis, but as an abstract concept, escalation at its most effective should be a gradual process. As gradual as you can be within a 2-hour run time, anyway. JAWS escalates at what might just be the perfect rate, and earns bonus points by using the process to simultaneously define Brody’s character.

The Shark’s first victim, Chrissie Watkins, kicks the bucket in the opening scene. That first kill needs to happen – and happen quickly – because really, if the Shark doesn’t eat anyone, how would the people of Amity Island even know it was there? (The correct and boring answer is ‘Someone would see it from a boat or something,’ but shut up, because that’s not how movies work.) It’s over and done with pretty quickly, visceral in what it shows, but leaving most of the details to the imagination. All this sequence needs to do is establish the Shark as a threat, and it succeeds.

Following this attack, we meet Martin Brody, and right away, it’s clear that he's going to be out of his element here. He probably hasn't seen much action, as Amity hardly seems to be plagued by crime. Hell, he's even scared of the water, something that's clearly going to be a problem. The town coroner correctly pegs Chrissie’s cause of death as ‘SHARK!!’ and Brody offers right away to close the beaches. But, because that would be bad for business, he buys into the Mayor’s alternate explanation of a boating accident without much fuss. At this point, he’s getting paid to put up signs, not investigate suspicious deaths.

After Chrissie, the Shark’s next victim is a dog, which serves as a nice stalling tactic. A missing dog isn’t enough to alert the police over, but it is enough to tell the audience that the shark is still out there, even without showing the attack. Also, it makes us sad.

(You may be wondering why an actual human female ranks lower on the escalation spectrum than a dog. The harsh truth – aside from the fact that dead dogs are just sadder than dead humans when it comes to film – is that Chrissie Watkins was drunk, possibly high, and very likely about to have sex at the time of her demise: a victim trifecta. The poor girl couldn’t have been more marked for death if she was being played by Sean Bean.)

The third victim, Alex Kintner, is where the turn really happens; if Brody had followed his instincts and accepted the initial coroner’s report, Alex’s life may have been spared. Instead, Brody listens to the Mayor, and a little boy dies. The incident leads to a manhunt – er, sharkhunt – which allows both Hooper and Captain Bartholomew Marion Quint to be brought into the picture. When a shark is caught and the hunt is supposedly over, Mrs. Kintner publicly shames Brody for having known about the Shark all along and doing nothing. That gives the chief a much-needed wake-up call, and Hooper provides him with a chance to make use of it right away when he declares that this isn’t the Shark they’re looking for. The subsequent discovery of a tooth in a wrecked ship proves that not only is the real Shark still at large… it’s a Great Gorram White.

Fun Fact: This head actually screams when it comes onscreen. That, of course, makes absolutely no sense. But boy, does it work as a scare.

Finding out that our Shark is a Great White raises the stakes more than any one victim ever could. A shark terrorizing your beach is bad, but a Great White Shark terrorizing your beach is something you may recognize as being the Worst Thing Ever. This news and Brody's humiliation combine to create a scenario in which the chief has no choice but to take action. Unfortunately, he still isn’t ready to stand up to the Mayor, who is convinced that the Shark has been caught, so the action that Brody ultimately takes is: “Let everyone keep swimming, but be super duper careful about it.”

As Amity’s beachgoers return yet again to the water, the tension hits an all-time high. We all know what’s going to happen, and sure enough, after a few false alarms, the Shark claims its fourth victim. However, the status quo has changed, with both the audience and the protagonists knowing more about what they’re up against. As the shroud of mystery begins to fall away from the Shark, we are finally granted our first real look at the beast, almost an hour into the movie. And boy, is that look a doozy.

It’s cool. You can go change your pants. I’ll wait.

A good rule of thumb for horror is that the monster you can’t see is scarier than the one you can, and JAWS tries to stick to that philosophy (largely by accident, since Bruce the Shark almost never worked). Nonetheless, there comes a certain point where we need a visual simply for frame of reference, and if this first appearance of the Shark says anything at all, it’s ‘Oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die.’

From a plot perspective, what really matters about this kill isn’t the poor guy who gets eaten, but the fact that the Shark very nearly gets Brody’s son instead. Brody stood aside in the past, against his better judgment, and Alex Kintner was killed. When he made the mistake a second time, the child who died was almost his own. I don’t care who you are; that’s gonna be a kick in the pants. Indeed, this is the last straw for Brody, who finally stands up to the Mayor – basically kicking him while he’s down – and takes things into his own hands, hiring Quint to kill the Shark.

What follows from here is one of my favorite hours in the history of film, chock full of amazing sequences, not least among them Quint’s legendary Indianapolis monologue. The balance between character conflict and Sharkitude is maintained, and things continue to escalate, but it's all so brilliant in its simplicity that there's really nothing I can tell you that's better than the experience of seeing it yourself. Suffice it to say that Quint really wants to catch that Shark, like, yesterday. And as the Shark gets scarier and scarier, Quint gets crazier and crazier. In the end, he's more responsible for the events of the climax than the Shark is.

Would JAWS still work as a movie without Quint and the Mayor? Maybe, but it wouldn't be nearly as good, as the plot would likely be stretched too thin. Quint is the less necessary of the two, but he's crucial in the final scenes, and he's also a friggin' amazing character, so I sure as hell wouldn't cut him. As for the Mayor, any attempt to extend the movie's run time without him would require making Brody either a complete idiot or criminally negligent, and thus, extremely unlikable. As it stands, the film sets up a scenario in which there really are no easy answers, and gives us a protagonist with a much more relatable flaw: he's afraid to defy his boss. As with any good hero, though, Brody comes through in the end, and in his moment of desperation, finishes his character arc by graduating to full badass.

Sadly, the one thing he couldn't manage to do was convince Quint to get a bigger boat.

'In the aaaarms of the angels...'

A brief addendum on Sharknado, because really, how could I do a blugpost on shark movies and not talk about it?

It’s bad. I think everyone knows Sharknado is bad. Even Sharknado knows that Sharknado is bad. It was done that way on purpose, a fact that changes the way that we have to look at the movie. Of course the pacing is terrible, of course the characters are undeveloped, and of course the sequence of events is disjointed and unmotivated. We simply can’t judge Sharknado by traditional means. What we have to ask instead is if it’s bad enough to be good again. And my answer is… barely. It’s super silly, but not necessarily fun. It’s so-bad-it’s-passably-entertaining. Watch it once, if you can.

Three things that are unironically fantastic about the film:

1) Around the 90-minute mark, I found myself shouting “Careful! There could be a shark in there!” at the screen with complete sincerity. At the time, the characters were exploring a warehouse, about 15 miles inland.

2) The greatest quote in cinematic history: “We can’t just sit here and wait for sharks to rain down on us again.”

3)   The second greatest quote in cinematic history: “Your son wants to go into a helicopter and drop bombs into the tornado.”

About As Much As Meets the Eye

Let me start out by saying that I do not condone the Michael Bay hate bandwagon. True, his track record isn’t the best, but the guy still gets a lot more vitriol than he deserves. He’s a visionary, and more importantly, he isn’t the least bit pretentious; he knows his movies are dumb and mindless. Half the time he outright admits that they’re bad. Bay’s primary – hell, only – concern is being smash bang awesome, and in a weird way, you have to respect that. His work is fun to watch, even if it’s badly written, and given that he doesn’t write his films personally, I really do think that he could make a great movie if handed a good script and forced to shoot it as-is. Now, would I be saying all of this if he weren’t an alumnus of my alma mater? Probably not. I can admit my biases. In any case, I describe Michael Bay as a visually skilled director who doesn’t much care for thematic elements. And if that’s the best thing you can say about him, well, that’s what I’ll say.

Of course, there are also rumors that he was awful to Kate Beckinsale when they were filming Pearl Harbor together, and that he made her feel ugly. So never mind. Hate away. I'll be over here when you're through.

The only universe in which this is a photo of an ugly woman would be that Twilight Zone episode where all the 'attractive' people had pig faces.

  

Anyway, Transformers!

Qualitative statements first: Transformers, viewed objectively, is a perfectly capable and enjoyable movie. But there’s a caveat to that statement, because the assessment only applies if you’re willing to pretend that the film isn’t based on an existing property. As a Transformers movie, it’s actually pretty bad, and to me, at least, that makes all the difference.

Before this film came out in 2007, you could get your Transformers fix in three main forms. First and foremost were the Hasbro action figures – that goes without saying – but the characters also made plentiful appearances in comic books and on television, with Sunbow’s 1984 cartoon series probably standing as the most well-known iteration. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of the comics, but I have seen my fair share of the Sunbow cartoon over the last year, so consider those my credentials for the writing of this blugpost.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the franchise, the Transformers are not that complicated. The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, are good. The Decepticons, led by Megatron, are bad. They fight. The end. And believe me, they will fight over literally anything. Often it’s for control of Cybertron (their home planet) or a stash of Energon (a rare energy source), but it really doesn’t matter. You could toss a pizza in the middle of them and shots would be fired over it. Cybertronians can’t even eat pizza. That’s just how much they hate each other.

This is all a long way of saying that when you look to adapt the Transformers license, you’re given well-established sets of both protagonists and antagonists to make use of. The writers of Transformers, however, clearly weren’t interested in doing this, and where they did, they chose the wrong group, taking a random assortment of Decepticons and saddling them with the unenviable task of carrying the film’s first two hours. Now, Megatron is a good villain, but he isn’t activated until just before the final battle. Starscream is a great villain, but he’s wasted here, with nothing particularly interesting to do and none of his personality coming across. The rest of the Decepticons… well, they barely even have distinct identities, let alone compelling ones. So I suppose in that regard, the writers stayed pretty true to the canon.

Call me a racist, but they all look the same to me. Decepticons, I mean.

Thank goodness, Optimus Prime & Co. do finally show up as well, but when you really look at the plot, you can’t help but notice that they are, against all logic, actually given less agency within the film than Megatron’s crew, with all of their would-be heroics being co-opted by any one of the four – count ‘em, four – distinct groups of humans that were needlessly shoehorned into the screenplay.

The main character of Transformers is Sam Witwicky, a human, and despite what I just said in the above paragraph, I completely understand the desire for a human protagonist. Transformers is reimagined from the original backstory to take place in a much more realistic setting, so there’s a strong need for an audience surrogate as alien robots begin appearing in what is, for all intents and purposes, our world. If it were you in that situation, you’d be pretty flustered, and no one plays flustered quite like Shia LaBeouf. So that’s fine. The real trouble is that, in addition to Sam, major screen time is given to the group of hackers that uncover the Decepticons’ plan, as well as the soldiers that figure out how to kill them. Throw in the government agents from Sector 7, who were kind enough to find the film’s MacGuffin – the AllSpark – before the movie even starts, and Sam and the Autobots are saved the trouble of actually having to accomplish anything at all.

When all is said and done, the Autobots have little to do in the film besides provide exposition, a task that could easily have fallen upon Bumblebee alone had he not been arbitrarily robbed of a voice. (Every other iteration of the character can speak just fine.) In fact, if I were rewriting this script, and the Transformers were not a pre-existing license, my very first change would be to cut out all the Autobots but Bumblebee.

That’s not a good sign.

But it’s also not far off from the state that the film is in now. Quick! Which one of the Autobots is killed in the movie’s final battle? Well?

Time’s up. His name was Jazz, he was Optimus’ second-in-command, and he was the black one. You probably didn’t know any of those things, though, because the movie devotes all of ten seconds to developing his character before demoting him to a piece of fancy scene decoration. I will remind you now that this film is well over two hours long.

So what would I do to turn this back into a true Transformers movie? It’s as simple as returning the focus to where it belongs and clearing out superfluous plotlines. Sam can stay, for the reasons explained above. Mikaela can stay too, because of…

… story structure. I’d even be okay with letting the soldiers keep their first few scenes, since it is a pretty cool way to reveal the Decepticons. But everyone else has got to go, and fork over their valuable screen time so that we can actually get to know the Autobots. Bring them in earlier, and have them go after the AllSpark with Sam and Mikaela, fighting Decepticons along the way. There’s a wealth of backstory to mine here, and the Autobots’ different personalities would… their personalities…

Okay, real talk.

As beloved as the Transformers may be to some, the early days of the cartoon didn’t worry much about well-crafted characters, with the exception of a few standouts. All of the bots are distinct from one another in theory, but there are so many of them, with so little focus given to each one, that after just a three-month hiatus from watching the show, the ones I remember as more than just a name could be counted on two hands: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Rodimus Prime, Galvatron (who’s just an upgraded Megatron), Blur, Grimlock, Ultra Magnus, and someone named Omega Supreme, if I’m not confusing him with a Taco Bell menu item.

He transforms into a rocket surrounded by a mile of circular train track, which is somehow even more conspicuous than a giant robot.

So yeah, the bar may not have been set very high, but the fact that the film still falls well below it makes the writers’ abject failure all the more frustrating. They weren’t dealing with an entire army of Autobots here; they intentionally limited themselves to five, which is more or less on par with what an episode of the show would use – in a script about one-sixth the length, no less. Moreover, I’m sure that, had the writers gone looking, the comics would have offered up a wealth of in-depth characterization for each of the movie’s supporting Autobots; in the grand scheme of things, Jazz, Ratchet, and Ironhide are all top-tier characters. Hell, comic book Ratchet got several-month story arc devoted to him, while film Ratchet has only a handful of meaningful lines, one of which is a thinly veiled boner joke. The fact that the 1984 versions of these characters are more nuanced than the 2007 versions is disheartening, to say the least.

I’ll reiterate: none of this matters that much if you aren’t already a fan of the subject matter. The existing plot, while a little lazy, works fine with the human characters in place, so as long as you don’t go into the movie wondering if Wheeljack if going to show up, you’ll be fine. And honestly, most people who went to see the film in 2007 probably weren’t die-hard Transformers G1 fans, so there was no real need for the filmmakers to cater to that group. But what gets me is the simple fact that they absolutely could have catered to that group, while still making a great movie in the process. Instead, they chose the easy way out, cashing in on a name while including only the most basic fanservice.

Oh well.

It’s still better than G.I. Joe.

Which is a shame, because that show KICKS ASS.