The most highly anticipated film of the year is based on a 1980s-era line of toys. But what toys! Transformers (“Robots in Disguise”), with the catchy theme song (“more than meets the eyes”) that enchanted many a mostly young male demographic with the two-in-one wonder of a toy that was both a vehicle and a warrior robot. It challenged both the imagination and the intelligence thus tingling two parts of the brain: the neat idea of dual identity robots and the skill necessary to transform the toy from one state to the other. The Hasbro franchise licensed a series of animated programs and one animated film and have never been far from the toy shelves. So when it was announced a couple of years ago that Steven Spielberg would be producing the live-action adaptation with blow-em-up director Michael Bay in charge, many a fanboy old and new almost wet their pants.
Short take: It’s about as good as a film based on a the idea of transforming robots can be. The challenge was to make the film appeal to its core base of boy fans and men with fond memories of their original Transformer toys, while reaching out to the larger filmgoing audience who were needed to make the film a blockbuster in fact not just in intention. How do you do that in a film about metallic characters who appear as recognizable vehicles from sports cars to trucks but who transform into their robot form of somewhat greater mass? And then have them talk to each other as characters with human traits? The film rightly starts with human characters to give us a sense of scale and a biological grounding (for about five minutes) before the first Transformer, one of the evil Decepticons, appears to wreak havoc at a desert army base. It is about an hour into the film before we get the long-awaited money shot of the noble Autobots assembled with their true blue and red leader, Optimus Prime as they gather to plan their countoffensive against the terrible Decepticon scheme to turn earth’s technology into a vast robotized army to destroy all humans.
By this time, the audience has had time to buy into the internal validity of the concept as plausible in a three-dimensional movie world. The robots are wonderfully realized by Industrial Light and Magic’s special effects. But it’s the human actors, led by the young rising star Shia Labeouf, as the teenager who buys an old Camaro, only the find out its the Autobot named Bumblebee, who has been sent to protect the boy who has an object the Decepticons want.
Of the summer blockbuster I’ve seen this summer, Transformers was the most fun, which is what we usually look for in movies at this time of the year and which has been in rather short supply so far. I would fault it for resorting to a brief interchange or two of purely unneccesary sexually-related dialogue wholly out of place at a movie aimed at a core audience that includes pre-teens. Many a family car will leave the theater parking lot with embarrassed parents being asked by a youngling, “Daddy, what’s masturbation?” Removing those lines is the only transforming this film should have had before its release.
