Review: Transformers Will Unleash Your Inner 12 Year Old
- Jun 17, 2017
- 2 min read
In 2007 Michael Bay unleashed Transformers onto the world. Taking what was little more than a high budget advert for a toy line and bringing it to the big screen is no easy task but something like Transformers, a franchise with literal decades of content, it is nigh on impossible. And yet here is the flashiest director ever doing something that shouldn’t be doable.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is a nobody. His biggest achievement in his young life is acquiring one crappy second half car. As it turns out that car is a robotic life form from another planet, Bumblebee. He is an Autobot, a faction, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), that has been fighting against the evil Decepticons, led by Megatron (Hugo Weaving), for centuries. And now their war has made it’s way to Earth, leaving Sam stuck in the middle of a battle of colossal proportions.
Transformers isn’t a smart movie, it’s not a movie with some higher meaning, clever writing or quality characters. It’s a movie about giant robots beating the snot out of other giant robots and at that, it excels. It features one of the single best action scenes ever made, that being a desert battle between special forces and a van sized robo-scorpion. The effects, particularly those that created the transformers themselves, were impressive in 2007 and hold up incredibly well even today it the actual transformations remaining some of the coolest visuals around. Toss in some excellent music, seriously, the score for this movie is gold, and you get some truly epic sequences of large scale destruction. I cannot count the number of times I could not suppress the grins, the laughter at how ridiculous, over the top and entertaining it was to re-watch this movie. For a time it was 2007 and I didn’t care for deep storytelling and compelling characters.
The acting is pretty poor across the board, though it seems to be more the fault of a poor bad script more so than the actors themselves, though there are a few solid performances. Weaving and Cullen bring an incredible amount of gravitas to their characters, delivering some of the most memorable lines of any blockbuster franchise. Jon Voight is good as the US Secretary of Defence and John Turturro gives a bizarrely terrible yet wholly entertaining performance as a member of the mysterious Sector 7.
Transformers may not a clever movie but it is an entertaining one. The human components are as flat as a piece of paper and it barely qualifies as being written but I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy watching a 30 foot robot toss another around a city while a walking tank rains hellfire upon the military. Don’t go in expecting much and you’re bound to enjoy yourself.
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