June 5, 2007 -- “Transformers” is a rocking action movie with some campy humor that succeeds despite the drawbacks of being overly long and repetitious. The film makes effective use of digital animation for realistic-looking machine transformations. Cars, trucks, army tanks, jet planes and helicopters turn into robots and vice versa. It is a big, silly, summer action movie aimed at teenagers and below. It should entertain its target audience well, judging by the cheering and yelling in the youth-oriented sneak preview audience I was a part of.

What little I know about the transformer mythology I learned from this movie and a few TV commercials. I haven't seen the previous two transformer movies released in the 1980s, or read any books about it. The transformers are a race of living, thinking robots who can transform their shape to mimic just about any machine, including boom boxes and other harmless-looking devices. Some transformers are evil and some are good. The evil doers (called Decepticons) destroyed their own planet eons ago and have come to earth to destroy mankind. The good transformers (Autobots) came to earth to stop the evil plans of the Decepticons. The Decepticon plan to conquer earth depends on finding a mysterious cube of power called an Allspark and the lost leader of the Decepticons, Megatron. A young boy, Sam Witwicky (played by Shia LaBeouf of “Disturbia”) unwittingly holds the key to that which the Decepticons are seeking. Witwicky and his friend, Mikaela Banes (played by a hot-looking Megan Fox) find themselves trapped in the middle of a struggle between Transformers and various competing government agencies.

This plot takes a long time to come to a conclusion (the film runs almost 2.5 hours). It has plenty of action, but the action scenes seem to blend together. They all start to look the same. The plot starts to fall apart towards the end as a band of soldiers who survive a Transformer attack suddenly ignore their chain of command and start taking over the defense of the entire earth on their own. Other characters start making similar leaps of faith, devising strategies based on knowledge they could not have gained except by reading the script. The plot keeps leaping into the unknown with no explanation how it got there, but it works well enough. It probably works better for those who are familiar with Transformer mythology. What is more effective is the humor, based solidly on teen angst and parent-teen relationships. The humor and action don't always go well together, but both elements are needed. If this movie had tried to take this subject seriously (like “War of the Worlds” for instance), it would have been a disaster. The film's basic premise is absurd. Absurdity played for laughs, however, can be an effective form of entertainment.

Judging this film on the basis of art, it comes up short, but that is not the true measure of this film. This is no art film. This movie is an entertainment product aimed at a fairly specific juvenile audience (which just happens to be the biggest share of the national movie-going audience). This movie is bound to get some negative reviews from critics who reflexively knock any film directed by Michael Bay. At least Ben Affleck wasn't in this one. That would have brought on even more knee-jerk scathing reviews. Judged for what it is, it works well enough to rate a B.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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