Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 57

Toymaker Hasbro must be delighted that their ‘Robots in disguise’ range will be introduced to a whole new generation through Michael Bay’s live action movie version. The question is, what does this mean for the fans who loved the show/toys the first time around (and there is a thriving community of them) and the rest of the audience who have never picked up a transforming robot and tried to fold it back into the car it started out as.

This is a movie about giant robots beating the living daylights out of other giant robots, so anyone who goes in expecting to get anything more than a lot of big robots hitting other big robots shouldn’t be so foolish. It’s also a Michael Bay film for heaven’s sake, so nobody should be expecting anything as sophisticated as believable characters, a plot that can’t fit on the back of a stamp or dialogue that wouldn’t make it through any decent editing process. That said, anybody who does go in expecting only to see giant robots hitting other giant robots is going to find themselves well catered for.

In the absence of a stamp, here’s the plot. A cube of immense power is hidden on earth and two races of giant robots want it. One will destroy the human race, the other will try to protect it. The kid who holds the secret to the location of the cube is targeted by both.

That’s it, let the demolition begin.

There’s very little point talking about the human cast as they are all very pretty and are required to be little else (with the exceptions of John Turturro and Jon Voight who both resort to scenery chewing on a scale that would make Jaws’ shark envious). What the audience are going to see are the robots and it is fair to say that they are impressively rendered. They don’t seem to have personalities, but then they are giant alien robots so what do you expect?

They also move very fast. When these things transform from their car/lorry/plane/helicopter/wha tever alias there are thousands of moving parts all moving at the same time and moving quickly. It’s too much for the human eye to assimilate all in one go. As a result, you can’t really appreciate it. The Peugeot TV ads that convinced director Bay and producer Spielberg that the technology was finally here to transform robots provided much simpler, slower transformations that were more effective. A bigger budget brings faster computers able to move more objects and so that’s what we get.

It’s also a problem in the action scenes where everything is moving so fast that it’s hard to tell which robot is doing what to which other robot. Not that you really care much.

Suffice to say that TRANSFORMERS is crafted for the kind of kids who were brought up on MTV and anime. Action, destruction on an epic scale and lowbrow humour are all that they’re looking for and TRANSFORMERS provides all of that in spades.

If you can switch off your mind and go with it, you’ll have a good time, but if you want more than giant robots hitting giant robots go look elsewhere.