Viking Night: Michael Bay May The Final Chapter - Transformers
By Bruce Hall
May 31, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I’ve spent an entire month writing about Michael Bay and I wasn’t going to mention Transformers. No, I was going to second attack on Pearl Harbor, that turn-of-the-century turd Bay inflicted upon humanity back in 2001. My reasoning was that my God, what is there to say about any of the Transformers movies? Giant robots fight over an obvious MacGuffin. Megan Fox leans over the radiator. Linkin Park sings about how painful something is. Sit back, relax, watch money fall from the sky onto Megan Fox. I guess what I’m trying to say is: there’s a formula for making it rain, and Michael Bay has mastered the equation.
On the other hand, we’re talking about a film franchise based on a terrible TV show from the 1980s. And, by the way, that show existed for no reason whatsoever other than to sell dumb toys to dumb kids. See? As you read that your hand instinctively reached for the phone to call Michael Bay. If you want to make a movie about a renegade cop who plays by his own rules and rocks a wicked set of sideburns, you call Clint Eastwood. If you want to make a movie about a karate master who robs banks on a jet ski, you need to involve Jason Statham. And if you want to make a $150 million movie about a low budget TV show about a shitty toy…
Right. You see where I’m going. The other problem with Transformers is that by definition, there IS no story. That may be fine for a half hour on Saturday morning, but how the hell do you stretch that into a film worth the cost of a fighter jet? Well first, go back and read the last sentence of the previous paragraph. Then, read the next one for some background on this.
I remember Transformers from when I was a kid, but I was probably outside the target demo. I was still young enough to play with action figures (dolls are for girls...duh), but too old to be interested in dumb little plastic robots that look awesome but do nothing. Or to be more precise: they were dumb little plastic robots that turned into dumb little plastic cars, or planes, and sometimes dinosaurs. It’s a neat trick the first time you see it, and then it kind of stops being interesting.
Also, adding 90 seconds of origami to the process doesn’t make a toy very easy to play with.
But hey, wasn’t Transformers a popular television show, you say? The answer is yes but again, I wasn’t the target. Even as a child I quickly cynical of what were obviously nothing but half hour toy commercials. And they ALL relied on some variation of the same boring formula. There would be a group of stupidly named heroes pitted against an equivalent number of stupidly named villains. They would all fight with similar weapons (lame), tactics (none) and costumes (flamboyantly homo-erotic, usually). Nobody was ever killed, or even seriously injured in any way. Neither side ever gained an advantage on the other, and nobody ever really “won."
Every week was just another in a series of increasingly less plausible contrivances for these characters to fight frustratingly inconclusive battles with each other. Narratively, this eventually became as much fun as watching someone you love burn in hell. Economically, it was a convenient excuse for constant character churn, which meant new toys. Personally, I got so tired of watching shows about nothing try to sell me toys that DID nothing, at some point I just went outside to ride my bike, and never came back.
Bye, Mattel. Go screw yourself, Hasbro.
Now, we live in a world where a surprising number of kids don’t even KNOW how to ride a bike. And where I was appalled by the clearly vapid nature of Transformers, the TV show, somewhere another child couldn’t get enough of it. For him, this would be the pinnacle of storytelling and imagination. He would vow to grow up and become a powerful Hollywood executive, helping to pioneer the art of the two-hour toy commercial. Decades later, he would instinctively reach for the phone to call Michael Bay - and the Death of Film could truly begin.
So imagine that there are two competing races of alien robots that, for some reason, are shaped like people. One is good and one is evil, although the only way to really tell them apart is that one side doesn’t care who they kill and the other one kind of does. Also, Autobots kind of “look” good, and Decepticons kind of “look” evil, and for some reason have chosen to name themselves after an ominous sounding word (remember, we are talking about the kind of logic the sixth grade me already rejected). The other important thing to remember about Autobots and Decepticons is that they fight over shapes.
In every Transformers film I can recall seeing, beginning with this one, the giant robots are in search of a “thingy” that kind of looks like a cube, and it does robot stuff, and if the Autobots get their hands in it then hooray, and if the Decepticons get their hands on it, them they will use it to blow up the planet, or something. It really doesn’t matter, because the Thingy has traveled the vast reaches of space to crash on Earth, and of course the one person with the key to finding the Thingy is a fast talking, socially awkward teen named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), neither of whom look young enough to be in high school.
Naturally, this involves Sam and Mikaela joining the Autobots and their noble leader, Optimus Prime (voiced, as in the 1980s, by Peter Cullen). You may wonder exactly what it is about Sam that makes him the Key to the Thingy the robots are looking for, but explaining it would only prove why it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that most of the film involves a globetrotting Race for the Thingy between Team Autobot and Team Decepticon, who are led by the villainous (looking) Megatron (Hugo Weaving). Whoever finds the little metal square first, wins.
To the film’s credit, it does attempt to provide context to all that Robot Politics, but it’s mostly gibberish. To give the story actual weight, we’re told that should the Decepticons pull off whatever it is they’re planning, it’ll destroy the Earth. And for the most part, the plot is allowed to revolve around the surprisingly likable LaBeouf (remember when everyone didn’t hate him?), a group of lovable Army Rangers led by Josh Hartnett and Tyrese Gibson, and the possibility that Megan Fox might, at some point, get drenched with water. The robots, for the most part, are given enough personality that you can tell them apart, if not exactly come to care about them. In short, I guess I have to say that while the movie itself feels big, dumb and pointless, it does get the most important things right. That would be A) the giant robots, and B) the giant robot fights.
As I said, I never understood why a robot would choose to be shaped like a human, unless they knew at some point they were going to have to interact with us. The fact that every time a Transformer wants to go somewhere, it must change into something way better than a human kind of bears this out. But since Transformers ARE shaped like humans that turn into things like cars and jet planes, it introduces a lot of interesting possibilities with regard to Giant Robot Combat. Michael Bay is well known for his majestic hair and his hyper-kinetic action set pieces, and he puts the latter to excellent use here.
So at any given point there’s nothing of substance really happening on screen, but by God does it ever look cool! I suppose it is unfair that I have no choice but to look back at Transformers through the lens of the awful sequels that came after it, but since I have no choice, I have to admit it’s more fun than I remember. That's not to say I “enjoyed” watching it so much as it means I “didn’t hate it as much as I thought I did.” At the end of the day, Transformers is a Michael Bay joint, which means everything you think it does, both positive and negative. But that first film was also co-produced by Steven Spielberg, whose human touches do, to some degree, help the story resonate.
I know it’s difficult to imagine Shia LaBeouf as anything other than a punchline, but before he started sharing Randy Quaid’s toothbrush, both the quality of his work and the trajectory of his career were very different from today. But like it or not, it’s mostly LaBeouf and his interaction with his robot friends that drive the story forward. And before you tell me that Megan Fox can’t act, look at the girls they eventually replaced her with and get back to me. Neither Jon Voight nor John Turturro do themselves any favors as a pair of aggressively cartoonish villains, unless you’re a more demanding sixth grader than I was.
For those counting at home, Sam’s super annoying best friend is played by John Lancaster, so that makes 0-3 for people named “John” on this film, regardless of spelling.
At the end of the day, and at the end of Michael Bay May, what truly matters to me is this:
Yes, Michael Bay makes a lot of terrible movies. But between you and me, I wish the Pope had made the month of May a little longer so I COULD subject you to the glorious failure that is Pearl Harbor. But one thing even Bay’s detractors must admit is that even if you hate the spectacle of what he does, he’s at least very good at that PART of it. He’s so good, in fact, that Spielberg himself was the man who actually picked up that phone and was initially told “no.” Yes...Michael Bay himself felt that a stupid popcorn flick based on ugly toy robots was beneath him. And then, as Spielberg must have done - as I have done - he looked over his own filmography and knew what we ALL now know.
Michael Bay was the only man alive who COULD make this movie successful.
It’s the franchise he was born to lead. And a decade later he’s still making terrible, plot-free tentpole films about giant robots fighting - but never really winning - an endless, pointless, stalemate of a war. For the record, I hate it every bit as much as I did when I was a kid. But for one movie, made what seems like a lifetime ago, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg teamed up on something and it was actually kind of fun. It took the Grand Old Man of Hollywood himself to do it, but someone finally put Bay’s talents to the use they were always meant for.
Think about that.How many of us can say we’re doing what we were born to do, and even though it’s a stupid thing, we’re doing it better than anyone alive? Michael Bay can, and he can do it with his spectacular golden mane held high. I still hate most of his work, and I still say he’ll never win an Oscar.
But he’s won my (grudging) respect.