"Oh no they didn't! They were more than meets the eye!"Transformers was a disappointment. That's really all I can say, if I were going to summarize my feelings in a sentence. Transformers was a disappointment.
Going into this movie, you cannot expect a masterpiece. If you were, you were gravely mistaken. I went into it expecting a fun, 144-minute, lighthearted movie, with enough plot to get by, and tons of exploding robots. I guess it wasn't not that. But after two hours of robots punching each other, you don't really need that extra half hour. It got boring pretty quickly, and honestly, I found it a little bit offensive.
I liked the way it started out. It begins with an attack by Blackout, a Decepticon disguised as a helicopter, on a military base in Qatar. A small group survives, and goes to tell the government about the giant transforming fuckbot they have just seen. Meanwhile, we have Shia LaBeouf as the geeky teenage protagonist, who unknowingly buys Bumblebee, his Autobot guardian, from Bernie Mac the used car salesman. Bumblebee disguises himself as a '74 Camaro, later changing into a more recent model, because I guess we wouldn't've wanted to buy a new car otherwise.
From a show that was originally just a half-hour toy commercial, it comes as no surprise that this is a two-hour car commercial. However, even though we've been raised in a society based on product placement and stealth adverts, we CAN tell when we're being yelled at. At one point, the Allspark, a cube holding the power of all Transformers ever, or something, is shooting little blasts of energy out at random mechanical objects. These just include to be an XBox 360, still in the box (because there isn't a big enough logo on the actual console), and a pop machines, sporting a large Mountain Dew logo. I think around the hour-and-a-half point they stopped trying slick camera angles to get the GMC logo in there, thinking we'd be distracted by the fact that it was now shooting cans of Mountain Dew, uzi-style, at civilians.There is an interesting mix of characters in the movie. It is not just Shia LaBeouf and his foxy, popular crushee, but a small group of soldiers, as well a couple of computer geeks. I suppose this is the standard mix of characters in a movie involving all three groups, but they pull it off nicely. I was, however, mildly offended by the portrayal of the black characters in the movie. A blonde, british computer genius chick, one of the first to see the Decepticons' signal being used to hack the government's computers, goes to her friend Anthony Anderson for help figuring it out. He and his cousin, both of whom seem to be video-game obsessed, junk food-eating nice guys, live with their grandma, and yell at her from across the house. When the FBI comes, as the hacker chick illegally copied the signal from government computers, the cousin is the first to run, becoming outstandingly frightened at the sight of police. We later see Anthony Anderson and Hacker Chick in an interrogation room, with a plate of doughnuts. Anthony Anderson immediately scarfs down the whole plate, claiming that it will show their innocence. However, when a cop comes in, Anderson immediately cracks under the lack of pressure and comically turns over his friend, denying any wrongdoing.
Even at this point, I was not thinking about stereotypes or any of that, as it did not really hit me until later. At one point, all of our heroes are placed in a room with one another, and scratched into the wall are what look like three long scratches. One of the Qatar survivors, played by Tyrese Gibson, immediately walks over and remarks on the scratches, saying something about Freddy Krueger being "up in here." Anthony Anderson, obviously excited, bounces over to Tyrese, informing him that Freddy Krueger has four claws, and there are only three scratches next to one another. This means that it must be Wolverine. And, to prove his point, Anderson follows the statement with a cat-like scratch and a howl.I am still trying to figure out the important or relevance of that little conversation. It got across a point that could've easily been gotten across with one sentence and moved on from—There are scratches in the wall, and the people see them.
I think the main reason this bothered me so much was that these, the two African-American characters in the movie, neither of them were able to stop goofing around and take it seriously. By this point, everyone has accepted that giant robots are blowing shit up, and yet the writers still keep on throwing in these wacky, look-at-me-be-blissfully-ignorant moments.
The only other thing I noticed was involving Jazz, and Autobot in the form of a Pontiac Soltice, spouting slang terms and seeming like the coolest of the Autobots. This is explained by Optimus Prime, who claims that they had learned English from the Internet. Jazz, however, is the only one who uses the speech, serving to contrast the reserved, intellectual speech patterns of all but Bumblebee (who talks by strategically changing radio stations, forming vague, suggestive messages).
And then, at the end, Jazz is torn in half and killed by Megatron. ("You want a piece of me?" "No. I want two!")
2/4, I guess.
