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.