Big movie, tiny plot; Transformers are wimps

Some of the biggest movies ever created came out this summer, and in fact, are still coming out. 

The movies may be big, but the stories are small, small, small. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 sank. Shrek 3 was just boring. Spider-Man 3 was overproduced. I had reserved a shred of hope, though, for Transformers. Ten minutes into the big-budget popcorn flick and I realized hope is a deceptive belief to hang your expectations on when Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon) is calling the shots from a director’s chair.

Sure, Transformers is a nostalgia trip, an action vehicle, an effects-driven summer movie, but that doesn’t mean its story has an excuse to lay down for a nap, one from which it never wakes. What it all amounts to is a cruddy movie with a $200-million computer makeover. It’s amazing how a movie this big — the characters could share King Kong’s wardrobe — could drop into theaters with basically no real plot. Oh, I guess there’s a story: something about a cube, the Allspark, and an intergalactic war that spills into our world. But I shouldn’t have expected much; after all, the movie’s based on a line of Hasbro toys.

If you somehow skipped the ’80s the Transformers are giant alien robots that can morph (id est transform) into human creations like big rigs, helicopters, rescue vehicles, jets and even things as small as boomboxes and cell phones — although, since Transformers must first scan the device before becoming it, even they had to wait for the iPhone. The transformation process looks like the solution to one of those complex box puzzles: pieces turn and flip, appendages rotate out of the shapes, and parts fold onto themselves and around others to create robot abdomens and trunks. And voila, there stands a 25-foot robot where a Camaro was once parked.

This presents the first problem: the robots have no real form, just a jumble of pieces. So when two Transformers fight it’s hard to tell what’s going on. It’s would be like watching two masses of paperclips battling — all you see is paperclips rubbing together. Couple that with super-tight camera compositions and quick cutting and you get a rather hard-to-see picture. All I wanted was a good steady look of the Transformers so I could admire their forms. That moment came only several times.

Good Transformers are called Autobots and bad ones are called Decepticons. The movie begins in the Middle East, where the Decepticons have staged a battle to retrieve government secrets from a United State military base’s computer network. Proving yet again that action movies never top the opening scene, the attacker arrives in the form of a military helicopter, but quickly transforms into Robbie the Robot on PCP. One small platoon of soldiers escapes with their lives, but they’re marked for extermination by a giant scorpion robot.

The movie jumps around a lot, so don’t get too cozy with the characters yet. We then jump to a secret government program called Sector 7, which knows about the Transformers, and have even frozen Megatron, a vile Decepticons leader. From there, we jump to some flunky computer hackers, who are analyzing an alien answering machine message, and then to Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), whose great great grandfather encountered Megatron under the Arctic Circle. 

Poor LaBeouf, who was so good voicing a character in Surf’s Up (this summer’s true winner) and playing a deviant teen in Disturbia, finally caves in to overacting and cheap mugging to the camera. His Witwicky character is developed through his eBay account, which the Transformers have hacked looking for Grandpa Witwicky’s polar spectacles. Suddenly, a yellow Camaro shows up with a Herbie-like mind of its own — “It’s Satan’s Camaro,” Witwicky says — and the other Transformers aren’t far behind. Eventually, Witwicky and his girlfriend (the “evil jock concubine”) are stomping through Los Angeles and the Hoover Dam with Autobot leader Optimus Prime and several other Transformers who have learned English from the World Wide Web, which explains why one talks like a Brooklyn rapper. 

Everyone’s looking for the Allspark, but other than that it’s a free-for-all with action sequences popping up between pointless scenes with government agents and random scenes with one-off characters that neither further the plot nor give us something to enjoy. One exception: Bernie Mac plays a car dealer named Bobby Bolivia (“Like the country but without the runs”). I might as well abandon my no-plot diagnosis and concede that Transformers is all-action, all the time. That’s why it’s going to make a bzillion dollars at the box office this weekend.

Why try and convince you that it stinks when you’ve already booked time in your schedule for its screening? I hope you enjoy it. I found it dull and bothersome. I will say this, though: some of the computer effects are amazing. The opening battle sequence will get the blood pumping through your veins, as will the long-lasting finale, which punches holes through the Los Angeles skyline. Especially noteworthy are the slow motion effects, most of which are shot with long telephoto lenses using a technique (compression) that creates busy scenery and full backgrounds, and it puts Transformers and humans on the same film plane, even though in the movie’s world there are 50 yards between them. Transformers burst from the sand as humans scatter, rockets zip past enemies and over the heads of pedestrians and robots corkscrew into battles dodging bullets Matrix-style in super-slow-mo. Very cool! 

It’s just too bad $200 million doesn’t buy a better plot, one that makes sense at every angle. And what’s with the Transformers changing their abilities mid-way through the film? They have machine guns in their fingertips, rocket launchers in their forearms and pulse rays on their shoulders, but at the end they resort to hand-to-hand combat. Are we sure this is an advanced alien race? I expect shoddy filmmaking from Bay, but what’s Steven Spielberg’s excuse? Maybe he was just too busy watching this (toys) transform into this ($).