Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 10

I was a fan of Transformers back in the 80’s. I had some of the toys, including Optimus Prime, the Dinobots and the Constructicons. The daily cartoon was a little cheesy. The Transformers animated cartoon was a lot closer to the mark (with me) on how dark the series should be. The mere fact that they killed off Optimus Prime showed the serious potential. Of course, then they went off on another cheesy vein with the junk planet, for example…

Now comes the current movie. I went into the theater without much in the way of expectations. I heard that the action scenes and the computer generated animation were incredible, and I wasn’t disappointed on that score. I felt that some of the action went by a little too fast, especially in the climactic battle in the downtown area. I was certainly made to feel like I was there in the thick of the action with the sound effects and explosions. I was told by friends that I couldn’t miss seeing this movie in the theater, specifically for that experience.

Now comes the parts that I was particularly disappointed with.

Shia LaBeouf: I liked him in Holes and in Disturbia. I think he is a fine actor. I thought he was a completely unnecessary character in Transformers, except perhaps because they had a human boy in the cartoon series, and they were using him as some sort of tie-in. I felt that the romance between his character and Megan Fox’s character felt completely tacked on to the storyline. I didn’t connect with or care about these characters at all. I was waiting for robots to fight and big battles and explosions… and these two teenagers and their teenage antics just got in the way. Bumblebee was a little cheesy as well, though he was a cool car.

John Turturro: He was awesome in “The Big Lebowski” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou”. He proved to be yet another annoying and completely unnecessary human character in Transformers, much like the majority of the rest of the human cast.

Finally, I really wished Michael Bay and the writers would have come to a decision as to who their target audience really was. Were they going to appeal to the old 80’s nostalgic Transformers fans of yore, or were they going to try to appeal to a newer and younger audience? Their attempt to appeal to both completely fell flat, in my opinion. I was sitting there watching this movie in a theater full of kids and parents. Suddenly there’s this long dialog on screen about how Shia’s character’s parents might have inadvertently walked in on him “masturbating”. Nevermind that this bit wasn’t really appropriate for kids in the first place, but it went on entirely too long. Some of the adults in the theater, who were sitting by themselves, chuckled. Nearly all of the parents who had kids there shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Their grade school children, sitting next to them, asked, “Daddy, what the people on the screen talking about?”

Transformers – Megatron vs Starscream