Transformers Review

Back in 1991, I watched an episode of the Arsenio Hall Show and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the featured guest. He was promoting Terminator 2 and he and Arsenio kept joking about the hype around it. They would say, "It's the biggest movie of the summer!" flash some jazz hands, and the quick-witted production staff on the show would flash "THE BIGGEST MOVIE OF THE SUMMER" on the bottom of the screen. Terminator 2, the sequel to the groundbreaking Terminator, went on to gross over $500 million worldwide, but more significantly it hailed a new age for CGI in movies. The mercury-like shapeshifting of the T1000 was like nothing anyone had ever seen and raised the bar for summer blockbusters. Explosions weren't enough anymore. The bread and butter for movie studios had to be slick and dazzling. While the plot of T2 was not quite as complex as the original movie, it still examined the age-old question of humankind's relationship with machines. They help us, but do they hurt us? Might they eventually destroy us?

Now we have Transformers, which revisits a popular comic book/toy/TV show empire that was extremely popular in the 1980s. In the tradition of the Terminator movies, Transformers ponders our future with machines, the existence of good and bad sentient robots, and tickles the human fascination with apocalyptic scenarios.

Oh, and the CGI? Three words: Believe the hype.

As the movie opens, we are introduced to a group of soldiers on an Air Force base in Qatar. The soldiers are trading stories about their perfect days back home: a cold hot dog and a flat beer at a Red Sox game, mom's homecooking, and getting to hold a new daughter for the first time. The proud new papa, Sargent Lennox, gets to chat via web cam with his wife and baby. The chat is cut short when the connection begins to fritz out. One of the aircrafts has suddenly morphed into a huge, terrifying robot, hellbent on destruction. The robot is a Decepticon and it's got some hax0r skillz. It storms into the main computer center of the base and goes to town, swiping ultra classified and top secret data. Only the original group of soldiers are able to escape the attack and head off into the desert toward a nearby town in hopes of finding a phone.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Sam Witwicky is dealing with normal teenage woes: he's kind of dorky, has a crush on Mikaela, the main jock's girlfriend, and is in dire need of a car. His dad has agreed to go in 50/50 with him on a car, so Sam uses his high school genealogy presentation as promotion for his eBay items. His great-grandfather was a famous explorer and led a group of brave sailors into the Arctic Circle. Sam has a few of his great-grandfather's tools and his glasses which are broken but have seen, "a lot of cool things." The great-grandfather sadly went blind and spent the rest of his days in an insane asylum where he drew lots of weird pictures, mostly characters from an unknown language.

Sam and his dad go to a used car lot to pick out a car for him. As used car dealer Bobby Bolivia explains, the owner doesn't pick the car, the car picks the owner. One somewhat crappy Camaro proves this quite literally by performing a number of stunts that render the rest of the cars on the lot useless. Sam's new car is pretty great, albeit a bit quirky. Sam is able to strike up a tentative friendship with Mikaela through the car's temperamental behavior and Mikaela's vast knowledge of auto mechanics.

The Pentagon is working furiously to find out who is responsible for the hack, enlisting the best analysts (read: hackers) in the world, even if they're just a few years out of high school. Another hack occurs upon Air Force One and that powers that be begin to discover that it might not be a hostile country behind the attacks, but rather a hostile species from somewhere beyond our planet.

Things take a turn when Sam hears his car speed off into the night. Thinking it's been stolen, he follows the car to an abandoned warehouse where he realizes that his car has many more skills than he ever thought possible. Yes, kids, it's more than meets the eye.

Of course, more robots, both Decepticons (bad) and Autobots (good) follow and commence their battle for an ancient artifact from their home planet, Cybertron, which has the capacity to bring to life all machines and ultimately enslave the human race to the Decepticons.

While the movie certainly has some plot holes (people are seen working in offices and buying XBoxes after a global blackout), the product placement is very heavy-handed, and the script is not exactly mind-blowing, Transformers is definitely worthy of comparisons to Terminator in terms of quality summer blockbusters. Maybe robots from outer space aren't quite as believable as hostile robots from the future, but the essential questions are still there. Could our reliance on machines ultimately work against us and put us in even more danger? How might we defend ourselves from an attack if the aggressors are much more advanced? The movie seems to suggest that we should invest in ice, baseball bats, and of course hackers (so long as the male hackers are overweight and dorky while the female hackers are blonde, hot, and Australian).

But at its core, Transformers is just a really cool movie. If nothing else, it's extremely fun to watch. The robots are unbelievable, their movements modeled after those of humans and they are so very lifelike. The Autobots are especially lovable, with their Asimov-like dedication to protecting humans, and their adaptation of Earth-based speech patterns via the web. I actually teared up a little bit when some of them got hurt. The fight scenes between the Decepticons and the Autobots are just breathtaking. If nothing else, John Turturro's performance as a bumbling government secret agent is worth the price of admission. I advise you to check it out. /end transmission.

Comments

[Tracey (Sweetney)]

kelly -- did they use the Gnarls Barkley song? because if they didn't, man what a loss for them.

[Marilyn]

I loved it. Stupid but so, so fun. Thanks for the review.

[Kelly]

Tracey, I don't think they did...which is a damn shame.

[Marmite Breath]

I keep wondering if I can take my five year old son to see it. He is absolutely obsessed with Transformers.

[Kelly]

Marmite Breath, we took our five-year-old son to see it and he really liked it. There *are* a lot of explosions and fighting and whatnot (though the language is very tame). It's not extremely scary. The bad robots are only mildly disturbing. If he can generally handle that kind of thing he should be okay. Whenever our kid sees something that is a little mature for him, we spend a lot of time talking about how it's pretend, what could and couldn't happen in real life, why fighting can be bad, that kind of thing. He's surprisingly well-adjusted. ;-)

[Amberina]

I saw it this weekend and I loved it!! Best summer movie so far. Shia Labeouf was hilarious

[Amberina]

I saw it this weekend and I loved it!! Best summer movie so far. Shia Labeouf was hilarious