Rating:

Michael Bay is the guy who brought you the woefully inaccurate and shallow Pearl Harbor, and who managed to turn an allegedly intelligent script into a big dumb movie with The Island.

So why not tap him to make Transformers, 2007’s best attempt at creating a franchise? It’s safely based upon an already-established fantasy market; no one will be able to argue with his absurd choices for alternate realities if he sets them in an agreeably impossible present day; and shirking human actors to instead direct giant CGI robots (read: walking explosions) is a Bay wet-dream.

What could possibly go wrong?

No, really. That’s exactly what I was telling myself to keep my anticipation positive, or at least neutral, before seeing this movie. I like Transformers. I thought a Transformers movie couldn’t be anything but spectacular—I mean, as far as I’m concerned, it worked for Spiderman and the X-Men.

But the bigger they are, the harder they fall, my friends.

We open with a robot-narrated backstory which details, among other things, how the Transformers—and most of the universe—got their start. Before we even see a significant image, we’re unabashedly told about moderately cheesy things like the life-giving “All-Spark,” and a fiery and eternal intergalactic war between two races of massive shape-shifting robots (for the record, the Autobots vs. Decepticons.)

So right off the bat, we know Bay isn’t making any allowances for people who may find it hard to suspend their disbelief. Either you like it, or you don’t—either way, shut up and take it. Good. I prefer brazen directors to timid and plodding bread-crumb droppers, regardless of the story told.

But then, it’s about 40 minutes before we meet the story’s “main” character, the young Shia Lebouf, who accidentally buys a car which is actually a transformer looking to get ahold of his grandfather’s spectacles. And no, I’m not going to explain how or why these glasses, or any other MacGuffins that move the plot along, are important—if Michael Bay doesn’t care about the plot, neither should you.

I will say, however, that those 40 minutes are definitely awesome. A Decepticon lands in Iraq looking for valuable and top-secret U.S. Military intelligence: the aforementioned 40-year-old glasses. Needless to say, it’s a giant scorpion and it goes up against fighter jets and gunships in the gleaming desert. I was entirely satisfied.

Then you’re reminded, courtesy of Lebouf, that there’s supposed to be a story associated with the action. And THEN you’re reminded, courtesy of director Bay, that the story is completely inconsequential, and thereby hideously incomplete.

Bit performances are turned in by an over-paid cast of A-listers, none of which have more than 20 lines in the film. These include Megan Fox as the incredibly attractive, yet shamefully vacant object of our hero’s desire. Jon Voight is the stodgy Secretary of Defense. Josh Duhamel is the handsomely determined army man. John Turturro, normally a perennial favorite, took a hit on his resume with his embarrassing and overblown portrayal of a secret government agent who’s out to imprison the Transformers, and keep their struggle a secret from mankind.

There’s also the hot Australian computer programmer who has the solution to why the robots are here, but no one will listen.

Of course, they’re here to find the infinitely important All-Spark, a detail which is revealed to us in the first 30 seconds of narration. So yes, there you have it: none of these people matter, nor does what they’re doing.

Did I forget to mention the robots? Oh… That might just mean that they were utterly forgettable. They “got their personalities from reading the internet,” which is the movie’s writer winking at you from the screen and saying “I didn’t want to do any real work on this movie.” Most of them speak exactly, to the word, as the little toys do in Toy Soldiers—the director of which was much more capable of emotionalizing automated-dialog.

Let’s see, what do they do. …Well, they all step on things because gosh-darnit-they’re-just-so-big-ha-ha. The movie positively gushes with hammed-up humor, but in case that weren’t enough for you there’s a Spielbergian, Gremlins-inspired “mini-Transformer” that climbs around being generally mischievous. Also the black transformer dies at the end.

Speaking of the robots dying in battle—none of them conspicuously do, aside from the black one, and the battle scenes are worse than your average Schwarzenegger b-side. A hundred million dollar budget behind him, and the best Bay could do was have the robots *roll around* in the street and the sides of buildings. They shoot at each other exactly once, in a sequence which Bay apparently thought was so boring he had to add a CGI woman-in-distress with noticeably grand cleavage. Then, of course, he takes us on a magical 20-minute CGI journey of two-story androids wrestling.

And really, that’s all the movie is: huge amounts of anticipation on both sides of the screen. It led to an elaborately bloated and perfunctory film, which was made by all the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. They didn’t make it because they wanted to, they made it simply because they could.

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