Saturday, July 28, 2007

Transformers: Thoughts

Say what you want about Michael Bay, but (by God!) don’t call him cheap. There is no denying that the man knows how to spend $100+ million dollars, and this time (in a film produced by Steven Spielberg) it’s Hasbro’s money that gets tossed into the blockbuster machine. What emerges from this meeting of the focus groups is probably one of the loudest, most colorful and clueless, movies of the aughts. Shia LaBeouf plays Peter Parker—I’m sorry (but...hmm...), I mean, Sam Whitwicky, an outcast dork too cool (it’s Bay!) to not have an innate aptitude for science or computers, and who’s superpower seems to be sarcasm, and even that is absent of irony, something that Michael Bay, with all his commercially honed wizardry, has, yet to understand. For a movie about robots that can change into machines (think, intergalactic shoppers), I found the film so earnest that it was difficult to find places in which I could add the appropriate ironic quotes (except for maybe John Turturro’s performance as agent Simmons, an agent of “S7”, who’s “crazy” eyes and underwear seem to suggest a none too subtle attack on his agent, who no doubt told him this was the kind of movie that would help pay for that vacation house in the Caribbean).

None of this is really a complaint mind you. Transformers has, at its rotten commercial core, the apple pie flavor that resides at the center of many a Spielberg picture. And, let’s be honest, irony is overrated and has ruined many a blockbuster this summer (Hello, Pirates! Good morning, Shrek!). However it is Bay’s own cluelessness as a filmmaker/human being that leads to many of the most stunning faux pas, particularly when he's making simplistic allusions to his idols (Spielberg and… himself): an homage to the most product heavy Spielberg picture (Jurassic Park…2, no less!), followed by the swirling camera shot Bay himself unveiled to much better and aesthetically pleasing effect in Bad Boys 2, an impulse that makes one wonder if Bay is simply parodying himself, or attempting to (pathetically) draw parallels between his elaborate commercials and Spielberg's honed nostalgia. Even more troubling is when this disconnect with reality is felt during a crucial plot point that has the Army, while attempting to hide the largest Rubik Cube in the universe from the Decepticons (bad guys, who've already demonstrated a willingness to engage in the mass slaughter of Army bases and Iraqi villages), decides (I kid you not) to take the cube to the nearest, most populated, area they can find, all of which leads to a scene in which Megatron (bad guy, who can change into a spiky space-jet) flies Optimus Prime (good guy, who can change into a semi-truck) into an office high-rise, bloodlessly killing hundreds of terrified and screaming computer people, a cinematic feat so shocking and blunt, it was only several hours later that my brain awoke to the implications post-Sept. 11th. Such daring do (or dunderheadedness) can only be the brainstorm of a man completely detached from humanity and human complexity, and who is completely immersed on the commercial viability of even the most heinous images. That Bay never considered, for a moment, the implications of such a scene, illustrates the great tragedy of Michael Bay the filmmaker: a technical wizard who never met a dolly shot he didn’t like (one wonders if the DVD will include outtakes of Tyrese Gibson and Shia dancing—or better, tripping—over the dolly tracks that litter the ground out of frame), and is a filmmaker who, while looking for his favorite open collared shirt, sold his soul to someone much more pathetic than the devil and thus lacks the faculties to ever be considered a true artist. I don’t care what that essay on my Criterion Edition of Armageddon says.

But Transformers is still a movie about robots, and, not surprising, it is the robots who steal the show (melancholy Bumble Bee, Prime, that persnickety CD Player/rat thingy), and it’s when they clash, metal on metal, and—yes—transform, that kids and fans of the toys and the old Marvel comics, young and old (present!), feel a tug inside our gut and find ourselves sucked back to the glory days, memories of Martha Quinn and Gorbechev are unearthed, and real sparks fly

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