Toward the end of Transformers, the latest overblown summer epic from explosion-maestro extraordinaire, Michael Bay, two giant robots in the midst of one of the film’s countless robo-rumbles tumble off a highway overpass and crash into a stream of traffic below. Tires screech, metal crumples, and glass shatters in a storm of sure-to-be extremely expensive vehicular destruction. For a young boy in a nearby car, however, there’s only one thing to do: Point out the window and exclaim, “Cool, Mom!” The mother screams in fear, but the kid’s gleeful shout is the only appropriate reaction — both to the ensuing robot-on-robot fracas and, indeed, the entire movie. Mothers and other authority figures may recoil in horror at the gargantuan, incoherent, violent mess of a movie Bay has loosed on the world, but boys the world over know that, no matter how incoherent, inane, and willfully ludicrous it is, Transformers is just plain cool.
This is especially true if you’re a mid-20s male whose childhood idea of a perfect Saturday morning involved spooning sugary cereal and zonking out to animated toy commercials like the one on which the movie was based. This, even more than most teen-oriented popcorn flicks, is a movie for boys and the men who wish they never had to grow up, a smorgasbord of youthful male wish fulfillment, in which geeks get the girl and a kid’s first car turns out to be a giant super-powered robot fighting machine. It’s a gaudy, $200 million nostalgia trip, an overstuffed, over-the-top paean to brain-fried boyhood, and it’s both as fancifully sincere and utterly nonsensical as any overstimulated eight-year-old’s midsummer daydream. By any reasonable critical standard, it’s a lousy film. But as adolescent fantasy, it’s glorious.
Of course, one ought to expect no less coming from the reigning king of frenetic cinematic spectacle, Michael Bay. As a director, Bay has long been an advocate for the unsupervised imaginations of geeky boys everywhere. In films like The Rock, Bad Boys, and Armageddon, Bay has taken up the cause of Big, Loud, and Ridiculous, positioning himself as the silver screen’s loudest and showiest testosterone partisan. He traffics almost exclusively in militaristic, mechanized action spectaculars in which raunchy boy’s clubs are called upon to save the world. He loves expensive hardware, lavishing a nearly lustful attention on everything from sports cars to spaceships to military helicopters, and loves to blow them up. And he has an appropriately short attention span — his erratic, twitchy editing moves at the speed and rhythm of an Xbox-pro’s thumbs.
All of which means that Bay was more or less bred as the perfect director for Transformers. The movie, for those that weren’t tuned in on Saturday mornings and weekdays after school during the Reagan years, is based on a popular cartoon and set of toys from the 1980s. Both featured two sects of robot aliens with the power to transform into a variety of impressive-looking vehicles who had come to Earth to battle it out. The evil Decepticons were led by the cruel Megatron, while the good guys, the Autobots, were led by the regal (and somewhat redundantly named) Optimus Prime, a red and blue semi-truck commandingly voiced by Peter Cullen, who reprises his role in the film.
As was the custom at the time, the show was little more than a hastily produced half-hour advertisement for the toy line. But, through a combination of conceptual brilliance and dumb luck, the show’s vehicle/robot characters became icons of nostalgia. There was never much to it, but it worked: Good robots fight bad robots, cool stuff happens, world gets saved, toy manufacturers rake in the cash.
Bay employs roughly the same formula for the movie, the difference being that the cartoons were made on the cheap with the toys as the main attraction, while the movie reportedly cost north of $200 million and is expected to dominate the box office the second half of the summer. The story involves some nonsense about a quest for an ancient, life-giving Cube, also, for no apparent reason, called the All Spark (which, appropriately, sounds vaguely like something Firestone might tell me I need for my car) that’s apparently necessary for the Decepticons’ plan for world domination. The Autobots, being generally against Decepticon plans under any circumstances, won’t stand for this. “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” Prime declares, staking a quick claim as either a neocon or a libertarian, and he and his team roll out for battle.
There are some audience proxy teen heroes played by Shia Lebeouf and Megan Fox, some gruff government officials (Jon Voight and John Turturro), and a couple of military dudes with big biceps and guns, and somehow it’s all related to a secret government something or other and a discovery made by arctic explorers in the early 20th century. But none of this matters, of course. The people are just props; Bay and his audience are here for the machines. It’s all just an excuse for the robot melees, the fireballs and madness and mayhem — or, as it’s known to the director’s many detractors — Bayhem.
And sure enough, Transformers, contains some of the coolest stuff you’ll see all summer — maybe ever. When, for example, was the last time you saw a muscle car speed down a city street, leap into the air while changing into a robot and doing a forward flip over an incoming missile, only to land back on the ground while re-transforming into the car and continuing to barrel toward its giant robot opponent? The amazing-quotient in this movie is off the charts; by the time its two-and-a-half hour runtime is over, you’ll be completely overloaded on awesome.
No question, the movie is sloppily directed, poorly paced, and woefully choreographed. Two gigantic robots fighting, it turns out, looks an awful lot like a giant ball of scrap metal and car parts rolling through downtown L.A. But it’s tough to really care about questions like, “Why did that happen?” or even “What’s going on?” when you’re constantly interrupted by “Oh my goodness! Giant robots! Weeee!” Bay doesn’t so much ask you to turn your brain off during the film as stage an attack on your senses that forcibly shuts down your reasoning capabilities.
And it’s that capacity — its ability to pound one’s thought processes into a frazzled, unquestioning, gelatinous blob — that’s so integral to the film’s appeal. As much as Transformers is designed to hook a new generation on the giant-robots craze, it’s also supposed to serve as a lavish nostalgia trip for all those children of the 80s just now entering the world of responsibility and adulthood. Bay’s frantic, brain-blitz approach recreates, on a much larger scale, the sugar-addled, zoned-out TV-watching rituals of 1980s childhood, offering a return to the days when all that mattered was what was happened after the commercial break. For good and for ill, it’s an escape to a not-yet forgotten vision of careless Saturday mornings spent in a childhood daze — bring your own Cocoa Puffs.
– Peter Suderman blogs at The American Scene.