A Boy and His Car
Warning: Spoilers. It’s about alien robots that turn into cars! The thing they’re looking for, they find somewhere! Somebody dies!
Ten minutes into Transformers: The Movie I realized something unusual was happening: I hadn’t winced or rolled my eyeballs once. I was enjoying a Michael Bay movie! The last time this happened was over a decade ago, when I saw The Rock (the one where Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery break into Alcatraz to take out hot Ed Harris).
Transformers is silly, fast, funny, loud, and happy mayhem. Shia LaBeouf— sounds like a badly-spelled menu item—who really does look like a high school junior, carries the movie despite strong competition from the special effects. The transformations are smoothly done, the robots have fluid kung fu moves. Your inner eleven-year-old will be pleased to know that the line “More than meets the eye” is uttered two or three times.
I didn’t follow the cartoons, but I can tell you the movie is less traumatic than the Transformers full-length animated movie at which my sister wept buckets. It’s also not as scary as its trailer suggests. Sure, Michael Bay’s fetish for fighter pilots running to their planes (in show motion, by the water) is in evidence (Does he have some kind of deal with the US military to produce recruitment videos?), but the sappiness is under control (The boy doesn’t yell “I love you man!” to Optimus Prime). Shia’s parents are hilarious, Josh Duhamel—who looks like Ryan Seacrest as a man—makes a strong impression, and it’s always good to see John Turturro. The girl characters actually have something to do besides look good; they’re more comfortable with machines than the guys are. (I wish the guy from Elephant had more to do than climb a tree.)
True, I couldn’t tell the difference between the Autobots and the Decepticons (as far as I could tell, the colored ones were good, the plain ones bad), but I still had a good time watching mass destruction. I predict a surge in sales of vintage Camaros. And the toys, of course, because Transformers is really a very long ad for Hasbro—that we in Manila can see a full week ahead of nearly everyone else. It seems unfair that a being from an advanced civilization would end up as a monster truck on earth, but that’s just my inner adult quibbling.
June 29th, 2007 at 09:02
cant wait to see it! i remeber i was in the sixth grade when the transformers was first shown on tv here in manila. my friends and i would talk about it the very next day. those were good times…..
autobots!! transform and roll out!!
June 29th, 2007 at 10:46
I winced a little at “I… am Megatron!”. Just a little. I suppose the line was understandable since for over 70 years the BFzzzt-378!@#$## were calling him %$&%GDFfzzz. [Spoiler scrambler on.]
July 11th, 2007 at 07:48
the movie was kinda silly but the little boy in me was shouting yahooo, its when i first saw Jurassic Park then saying to myself, ” they could do this now?” waited for Prime to utter the immortal words of my boyhood ” Autobots transform!” but heard only something similar though
August 1st, 2007 at 19:23
“It seems unfair that a being from an advanced civilization would end up as a monster truck on earth”
— It’s not so bad. When they get a bit scruffy, they can just electronically scan a newer astig model and get a new morph. Ano yun? Animorph meets Transformers?