by Robert Ciesla

Created on: September 24, 2009

Michael Bay, maker of much boom-boom-bang during his career, was chosen to bring a long-running toy-franchise to life. His past credentials include ARMAGEDDON and PEARL HARBOUR, not exactly prime examples of cinema engineered to lift our spirits to higher spheres. So does Mr Bay surprise us with TRANSFORMERS? Will he bring us a Bergmanesque study of the psyche or a masterful Hitchcockean thriller?

The answer is (cue slow motion, then a few fighter planes, explosions, and a whole lotta hollerin'): hell no!

After a US Army base is devastated in Qatar by a helicopter-slash-robot (and his buddy, a huge mechanical scorpion) the shotgun-toting Secretary of Defence (Jon Voight) recruits a bunch of high-school kids to investigate the audio captured in the incident. So this is how the National Security Agency operates: they just drag 'em out of class and give the most classified cases to teenage hipsters. As moronic as the whole premise is, it gets worse every passing minute.

Two factions of robots, the nasty Decepticons and the decent Autobots land on Earth to do major battle. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), an irate hyperhormonal protagonist, unknowingly put a pretty remarkable item on sale on Ebay: his grandgrandfather's glasses which were once upon a time engraved with co-ordinates leading to the mythical Allspark, or the Cube as the 'formers like to call it. That object is the source of the transformers' existence, and boy do they want it.

Mikaela and Sam posing. Image copyright Robert Zuckerman

Instead of focusing on the confrontation of the aliens, Bay shines a magnifying glass on the unlikely romantic tension between Sam and Mikaela (Megan Fox), an alpha-female mechanic with a supposedly hard past. Most of the characters, apart from the stiff folks of the Department of Defence, merely act as third-rate comedic relief. Sam's snappy parents discuss masturbation with him, his professor shows funny paper signs during class, and a dorky agent (John Torturro) ends up tied to a streetlight without pants.

The premise provides plenty of opportunities for special effects departments to strut their CGI-stuff. Those complex transformations are indeed a sight to behold. Too bad the fighting sequences are marred by bringing the action all too close to the viewer: half the time you can hardly tell what's going on.

One of the very few successess of Transformers is the casting choice for Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. He is voiced by Peter Cullen, the man who gave us the

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>