Review: Transformers

Directed by: Michael Bay

Written by: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Megan Fox, Rachael Taylor

Rating: [3/5]

Beloved animated properties finding their way to live-action inherently come with its challenges as something not needing to adhere to the physics of the real world must now fit into its box. However fantastical, it must now carry a sense of realism in order to match it up with humans. Transformers attempts this quite valiantly in bringing these robots in disguise to the human world and while it has plenty of issues that will only get worse in the sequels, this utterance works quite well. 

Teenage Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is getting his first car when his father fakes him out at a Porsche parking lot and gets him a rough-looking 1976 Chevrolet Camaro. Now a car owner he does not know how he would involve himself in a war happening robots who can turn into vehicles known as the Autobots and Decepticons. 

The Transformers films occupy a particular place in blockbuster filmmaking that makes complete sense. They bring this sense of scale and action with a beloved franchise where they just need to make these robots explode, throw in a human character in the middle of it, and it pretty much guaranteed almost $1 billion at the box office. What these films would later become will be written in other reviews but this feature provides something much more grounded, well as much as it could be and it starts with Sam Witwicky. 

A character who never gets the girl and now has to drive his lame car suddenly gets thrust into this when the car he just got happens to be an Autobot named Bumblebee. He now has to show a level of bravery to help them against the Decepticons, which is funny to think about because of the size of these robots and how there’s no way humans could possibly make any sort of impact. With the flick of a finger, these robots could kill any human being, but as we see with Sam, having a human on the side of the Autobots proves to have its own advantages. As much as these robots fight each other over this ancient war, Sam goes through his own journey, which feels relatable to the target audience of this feature, teenage boys. Not only does it involve toys but also Sam gains the affection of a very attractive classmate Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox). Let’s just say, teenage boys were never the same after watching her in this feature. She gets relegated to a character who serves as solely a love interest and to be ogled, which comes as no surprise considering this film’s director but the impact of this performance, as minimal as it may be for Fox is quite undeniable. 

The biggest question when crafting this feature, at least for me at the time, stemmed from what these robots would look like on Earth and the design undertaken by the creative team makes them feel fairly realistic. While in action they look very uninteresting as they feel like giant scraps of metal clanging off of each other, but when still it’s quite impressive how these robots look especially when they transform. It makes sense how they can so easily shapeshift into these vehicles and for the most part it all looks as good as one could imagine if the goal was to make them look realistic and not too cartoonish. Some might argue going down the route of making them more cartoonish may have served a better product, but that’s a discussion for a later time. 

With the issues plaguing this feature, which includes plenty of terrible dialogue, far too much exposition, and weak characters outside of Witwicky, it remains something that succeeds in entertaining. It does just enough of a good job of introducing us to these characters and as messy as the action sequences feel, they display what makes Michael Bay a fun director to watch. In his greatest efforts, he makes up for the deficiencies of the narrative with some spellbinding action and while I may not define this feature to have that level of quality, it mostly works and rarely left me bored at what transpired on the screen. Where the series of films goes from here becomes its own conversation, but to start we get quite a solid entry.