Transform into something good, please

I wanted to love Transformers the movie, but director Michael Bay wouldn’t let me. Just when I would start to get into the action, just when I was about to laugh at a line of dialogue, just when I was opening my mouth to say, “hey, this movie ain’t so bad,” Bay would come along and make a mess of things, ultimately creating a two-and-a-half hour mish-mash of product placement, pop culture references and lame jokes.

Based on a mega-popular Saturday morning cartoon series of the same name, as well as a huge line of action figures and a feature-length animated flick, Transformers the movie is a live-action fiasco that explores a thousand different ways to ruin a mood.

The effects in this movie are, of course, amazing. The robots are concurrently badass and puppy-cute. And the plot is deliciously ridiculous. An awkward young teenager named Sam “Spike” Witwicky (played by cutie-pie Shia LaBeouf) discovers one night that his old beater is actually an alien robot from the planet Cybertron. Spike learns that Optimus Prime and his morally upstanding Autobots have traveled to earth in seek of the Allspark, which is some sort of magical cube. The plot revolves around this magical cube, and yet it’s never clear exactly what the thing does–but whatever it does, it’s gravely important.

Optimus Prime’s evil nemesis Megatron and his dastardly Decepticons are after the Allspark too. When the Decepticons begin to cause a ruckus, shutting down the earth’s communications system and killing soldiers, Spike is torn between saving the world and entering the panties of hot young Mikaela (Megan Fox). You see, he just wanted to be a normal kid, but a pair of spectacles he was trying to hawk on eBay holds the key to the location of the Allspark, so both parties of robots are after him. Many explosions and battle scenes follow.

All of this should have added up to the most fun you’ve ever had watching a summer blockbuster. But it doesn’t. Instead, thanks to Bay’s staggering ineptitude as a director, most of Transformers is lackluster and boring. If only Bay would stop using those long, dusty shots of people walking in slow motion (invariably set to chamber music). These shots are meant to heighten the drama and evoke an emotional reaction from the audience, but always end up a laughable mess.

If only the characters would stop saying quasi-political crap like “freedom is the right of all beings.” Can’t we have one little movie that doesn’t allude to the war in Iraq?

The ultimate deal breaker is when Bay decides to make jokes about the shitty movies he’s directed in the past. At one point some fat kid quips, as he slurps a soda and watches the Decepticons destroy his suburb, “This is like, a hundred times cooler than Armageddon!”

And then there’s Bay’s obsessive need with “updating” the Transformers’ image. The Autobots have learned to jive talk in this movie, and keep saying things like “this is some serious shit!” Optimus Prime, once the primary-colored leader of the Autobots, is now decorated in red and blue flames. In the cartoon, Bumblebee, the cartoon’s good-hearted but bungling robot, transformed into a Volkswagen Beetle. Now, he’s a late-model Camaro. Lame.

But the movie strays from its canon in good ways, too. In the cartoon, Megatron transformed into a not-very-impressive little white ray gun. Now, he becomes a sleek fighter jet. Laserbeak, a Decepticon who was a cassette tape/bird in the cartoon, is replaced by a robot that transforms into a boom box and flings throwing stars (okay, maybe that isn’t so cool–but the idea is sure is hilarious).

But all in all, Transformers fails to maintain any sort of intrigue. The battles drag on for way too goddamned long, and most are filmed with a shaky handheld that makes it impossible to tell what’s going on. And there’s never much at stake to get excited about, because there’s no reason to care about the players involved. Bay’s attempts at character development are worse than idiotic. He puts a soldier in the desert, establishes that the soldiers has a wife and kid, and BAM, we’re supposed to care.

Transformers can be summed up in a single utterance: meh. Unless you’re a 15-year-old boy, you were recently a 15-year-old boy, or you secretly want to cornhole Shia LaBeuouf, don’t bother.