Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 46

Transformers: More Than Sliced the Eye

In 1929, Luis Bunuel shocked audiences in an early scene from his film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) depicting a women’s eye being sliced open by a razor. The image, now nearly eight decades old, continues to twist viewers in their seats. In the realm of special effects, its achievement depends more on the expectations of the viewer than the technical production. The actual image shown on the screen is of a dead cow’s eye being sliced open, but through tight editing with the image of a razor passing before a women’s face, the cows head is rarely detected.

While Bunuel hoped to mask the mechanics of his craft, Michael Bay is depending on his craftsmanship of mechanical objects to awe rather than shock his audiences. Transformers, the film adaptation of a popular children’s toy and comic book series from the 1980s, progresses with the measured pacing of an inaugural film in what is sure to be a very lucrative franchise. The story maintains decent plausibility for adults while maintaining accessibility for younger audiences. Two warring factions of robots, the protective Autobots and evil Decepticons, are drawn to Earth in search of an all powerful power source, referred to as the All Spark. The tale follows two major plotlines: that of Sam Witwicky, the unsuspecting hero in possession of crucial information to the discovery of the treasure and another focused on a small Army unit that unwittingly entangles itself with the cruel Decepticons. Sam Witwicky, played by Shia Lebeouf (Disturbia), is the traditional teenage hero, beset by contemporary versions of age-old themes: frustrating parents, the unattainable girl and a lack of a car. We have seen all of these things before, but Bay does a nice job of layering these human interactions against the developing robot story. Similarly, the secondary plot following the Army unit appears to function solely as a means to introduce action in the early scenes of the film. Eventually, the two plots intertwine, with the much-anticipated conflict between the robots accompanied by their human allies.

It would be unfair to expect a film based on giant fighting robots to be character driven, which makes the performance of Shia Lebeouf as Sam Witwicky notable. This promising actor shined most when opposite engaging characters. His interactions with his quirky parents, played by Kevin Dunn and Julie White, had the glimmer of an interesting plot line that could have developed,