Philadelphia Weekly

Transformers

D-
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight
Now showing

�

You almost have to congratulate Michael Bay. Most directors would be content to retire knowing that Armaggedon was the stupidest film on their resume. Let it not be said that this man doesn't know how to top himself.

Of course Transformers was always going to be dumb. It is, after all, a picture based on an inexplicably beloved line of Hasbro toys. For those of you who didn't grow up in the 1980s, these are clunky-looking alien androids that shape-shift into automobiles for no discernible reason. But the gravest mistake made by the filmmakers here is that Transformers isn't dumb in any of the fun ways we might hope for from a movie about gigantic robots beating the crap out of each other. The movie is instead head-scratchingly dumb--all-around perplexing instead of entertaining.

Our story begins more than 100 years ago, when an ancient war ravaged a distant planet and an evil robot named Megatron crashed to Earth, seeking a mystical energy cube called the Allspark. Our large metallic villain accidentally found himself frozen in the Arctic Circle, only to be discovered by the grandfather of our hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). Somehow Megatron managed to imprint the coordinates of the Allspark's location onto the elder Witwicky's eyeglasses, and our story begins when young Sam tries to sell the specs on eBay.

This leads to an unfortunate howler of a moment when a large, menacing machine picks Shia LeBeouf off the ground and starts asking him detailed questions about the status of his eBay account. But lucky for our lad, he just bought a bitchin' Camaro that seems to have a mind of its own, and it turns out the car is an Autobot named Bumblebee, selflessly devoted to protecting humankind from Megatron's nasty Decepticon minions.

Transformers sounds simple enough. Bad robots want the energy cube; good robots want to keep it away from them. Cue the clashing steel. But bafflingly enough, the screenplay by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci is a maze of pointless convolutions, following multiple separate plotlines that don't have anything to do with the story they're trying to tell.

A bunch of American servicemen in Qatar keep battling Decepticons for no reason that has any bearing on the outcome of the movie. At the same time, Jon Voight embarrasses himself as the secretary of defense, teaming up with a data analyst who looks more like a porn star (Rachael Taylor) so they can spend massive chunks of screen time huddled in front of monitors and keyboards, until the film finally just abandons their characters altogether. A berserk John Turturro eventually turns up as a shadowy government agent, having no small amount of fun at the film's expense. (He's the only person on-screen who seems to realize he's in a piece of crap.)

Meanwhile we're treated to a strained comedy sequence in which Sam spends an eternity looking around his bedroom for his grandfather's glasses as a bunch of Autobots taller than his house try to remain inconspicuous in the backyard. One hundred minutes into this 144-minute movie, the story itself hasn't actually started yet, and everybody's still standing around the Hoover Dam trying to hash out the plot.

Michael Bay's press-kit bio proudly proclaims that he's "won nearly every award bestowed by the advertising industry." Fitting, as Transformers is basically a feature-length commercial for Hasbro and General Motors. But I also think Bay's ad-man mentality is what makes him the most horrendous filmmaker in movies right now. Every frame he composes is an overdesigned money-shot, dappled in sunset hues and swirling, show-offy camera movements. But none of his images flow together, so it's often impossible to discern where his characters are in relation to one another. He's so busy selling you the movie that he's not telling you a story. And the main reason Bay's movies tend to run about 40 minutes longer than the norm is because he's so incapable of visually conveying any narrative information.

The final robot smackdown, which is all anybody wanted from a Transformers movie to begin with, is so incoherent it borders on abstraction. Knowing a big fight's a-brewing, our brilliant heroes move the Allspark from a secluded desert location to a bustling downtown area, thereby maximizing civilian deaths and collateral damage. (I'm assuming thousands were killed.)

The orgy of fetishized destruction is staged in such a flash-cut, geographically confounding manner that you never have any idea how many robots are even fighting, or how to tell the good ones from the bad ones, and finally Bay just resorts to dialogue updates from the cast to chart the battle's progress: "This isn't going well!"

Dude, I could've told you that two hours ago.