Ok, I can't take it anymore. I've tried to put on a good face and smile and nod when friends say Transformers was a fun, entertaining movie. NO. I thought it was a horrible movie. It could have been glorious, but instead, I feel like a part of my soul has been ripped out. Do you know who I am? I am Denny. If I know anything, I know robots. I'm now going to do my best to calmly explain what went wrong. Warning: Below be spoilers. *Deep Breath... let's go...*
Steven Spielberg hired Michael Bay to direct. Yes, he did Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon. But he also did the craptastic Pearl Harbor. He does great explosions. Developing deep plots and fleshing out his characters is not his strong suit. I might have been willing to overlook it except that he has proven that he doesn't have any respect for the fanbase nor the canon.
"I would listen to fans on the net. I really would. I would kind of hear their comments, but I'm still going to make my movie and I'll still put flames on Optimus."
He has publicly stated that he thought the idea of a Transformers movie wasn't worth his time until Steven Spielberg pitched it to him as a movie about a high school kid buying his first car. He even initially declined the offer, calling it a "stupid, silly toy movie" until he hit on a "great" idea for a scene about a kid hiding giant robots from his parents ending in a masturbation joke. Transformers was never about a kid dealing with aliens. That was ET. Transformers was about aliens being stranded on our planet and trying to survive. More like Starman.
Apparently Bay did have one "uber-geek" producer who tried to point out all the problems fans like me were sure to have issues with. Here's how Bay himself describes the encounter in a quickly retracted blog post.
"Tom had one creative meeting with me for one hour and ten minutes to be exact about a year ago. He told he was the uber fan boy and was going to protect me from the minefields. The type of minefields on the Net like 'Damn you Michael Bay', 'You wrecked my childhood Michael Bay' and other various web death threats I received. Tom proceeded to tell me how much he had problems with the robot designs and script issues. I realized he was worlds apart in my vision. I said thank you very much, and then showed him my office door - I never really spoke to him again other then to mutter hello."
A fan's opinion was WORLDS APART FROM HIS VISION!?!? WTF! Yet another leader who ignores his expert advisers. Clearly, he didn't want to make a Transformers movie. He just wanted to make Armageddon with car chases. *shakes head* I doubt Bay watched any of the original cartoon. If he did, it would have been a no-brainer to call the giant "Allspark" space cube an Energon cube (that's what the Decepticons did EVERY episode, try to gather energon cubes). I doubt he even took the time to watch the epic 1986 Transformers movie, or he would have realized (and tied something into) the fact that Optimus Prime's chest holds something very unique. Garrr... Uggg. I think I'm boycotting Michael Bay from now on.
Michael Bay, the Douche
Ok with that out of the way, on to my fan boy issues:
The Transformers were non-characters. What do we know about them? Not much. Megatron is homicidal. Optimus Prime is suicidal. Jazz is gangsta, bitches. (BTW, is it coincidence that Jazz dies?) That is the sum total of robot character development in the movie. Besides Optimus, no one has more than a second or two of dialogue. How convenient that Bumblebee, the robot who gets the most screentime has a busted vocal circuit and talks thru his radio. Michael Bay is apparently not interested in anything the robots have to say.
I look at it this way. At the end of the movie, the young couple makes out on Bumblebee's hood while the rest of the robots wait around in car form, watching. Would you dry hump in front of your friends? No? How about in front of a child? No? How about in front of your pet cat? Maybe? See what I mean? Bay doesn't see the robots as sentient creatures, he sees them as pets.
Flip the coin and there are too many irrelevant human characters. The hackers (the australian girl, Anthony Anderson and Jon Voight) could easily have been replaced by a room full of generic nerds a la Apollo 13. But no! We spend screentime watching the hot girl put it all together. And their science to crack the "code" is pretty lame by sci-fi standards (see Contact with Jodie Foster for some real code cracking hotness).
Same goes for the army dudes. Tyrese and White Tyrese are in the movie for one reason alone: To feed Michael Bay's fascination for army stuff. There was no reason that the guys on the front line in Qatar came all the way back to fight in the big final battle (in the middle of a densely populated city). Ugg. Who cares.
Fine, you need Shia Lebeouf to relate to the robots, just like Spike was in the cartoon. And yes, Megan Fox is smoking hot. But if this is a coming of age story like Mr. Bay intended, then the formula is boy can't get girl, boy leaves girl behind and goes on adventure, boy returns and impresses girl with new confidence/skill/bravery. Nope, instead, Ms Fox is gratuitous eye candy for the entire movie, and her presence only distracted people who would have otherwise have seen that movie was not so good. :(
The reason I'm picking off characters? Budget, which brings us to...
I read that Bay said that by turning the entire movie into a GM commercial, he saved $3 million dollars in donated cars. Bay plays the pity card by reminding everyone that he took a 30% pay cut to fit into the budget. But BULLLLLLLSHIT. This is not about coming in under budget. This is about casting. Bumblebee is a Volkswagen Beetle. Not a 2008 Camaro. Optimus Prime is a RED 18 wheeler. Not a blue truck with flames. I don't buy this "Oh you fanboys are taking it too seriously" garbage. I've said before that I would have been totally fine if this movie was called "Robots from Space". But no, it was called "Transformers". That title has a known valence that you MUST respect.
Did they recast Harry Potter as a short skirted schoolgirl? Hey, that would have sold. Did they "re-imagine" Tony Jaa from Ong Bak as the new Superman? Hey, he's a badass who likes to fly through the air, too! Perfect, right? No, studios allocate the money and cast the right person for the part as it is written. The same should go for vehicles. I wouldn't have minded if they got a slight update, but what we got instead was the most blatant sellout in a motion picture I've ever seen. Bravo Mr. Bay. You shaved 3 million dollars off your 150 million dollar budget and made a whore of something I cherished. The bottom line was you didn't think we fans were important enough to listen to.
Except for Bumblebee and Optimus, all the Transformers in robot mode looked exactly the same. During the fight scenes, I didn't know who was who. Do you realize how much that sucks? Think of your favorite sport. One team always wears light colors, and the other always wears dark colors. That way, even if you don't know all the players, you can still follow if your team is winning. In this movie, we just see a lot of action and explosions, then we have to wait for the uninteresting humans to narrate what happened. Wow, Jazz died? I had no idea. I guess I should have felt bad when it happened, eh?
Check out the cartoon Starscream and Thundercracker. You can probably tell that they both turn into jets with the large wings and visible cockpits. I picked these guys because they're the exact same toy model, yet notice how a simple palette swap easily sets them apart. In addition, they all had extremely distinctive voices, so you could even tell who they were when offscreen.
Now check out this collection of the movie robots. They all transform into different things, yet I challenge you to identify what their vehicle modes are. I know I can't, because the "chunks" are way too small and the designs are too busy. They simply went way overboard with the transforming technology (just like Spider-man 3 went overboard with sand technology). Now notice how, except for Bumbs and Opty, they are all a drab GREY. Jeez, at least they could have made the Autobots one color and Decepticons another. What about the logos? Did you even see the [way cooler] Decepticon crest anywhere in the movie? As for distinctive voices, oh yeah, no one except for Prime gets any lines! How the hell are we supposed to tell them apart?
Finally, the BIGGEST problem with the movie. NO SOUNDWAVE! He was the only one who had the ball bearings to still rock a robot voice. Yeah I know they had a boombox spider robot in the movie, but I refuse to accept that little gremlin was supposed to be Megatron's right hand man. I leave you now with a shrine to Soundwave. Screw you Michael Bay, you wrecked my childhood.
Flip the coin and there are too many irrelevant human characters. The hackers (the australian girl, Anthony Anderson and Jon Voight) could easily have been replaced by a room full of generic nerds a la Apollo 13. But no! We spend screentime watching the hot girl put it all together. And their science to crack the "code" is pretty lame by sci-fi standards (see Contact with Jodie Foster for some real code cracking hotness).
