If Michael Bay were any kind of food, he'd be a parfait. Much like the tasty treat, his pictures are loaded with layer after layer of bangs, booms, whizzes, and more booms. But with both indulgences, once you finish you are usually left regretting the purchase, and feeling even more empty than before you started. Bay's track record speaks for itself. His movies are rarely if ever imaginative, and rely heavily on special effects to even progress the plot. Very little time is ever given to character development, and in the end the audience usually doesn't feel satisfied. But with Transformers, Bay's style plays right into the expectations of the fan base.
Truly, the biggest challenge of the filmmakers was to create a believable and practical world in which these titans can clash. And truly, Bay rose to the challenge and succeeded in bringing the Autobots and the Decepticons onto the modern global stage. After making sure the audience feels like the story is plausible, the next challenge would be to visually design the Transformers in a non-cartoony way. Again, Bay along with his army of digital artists succeeded brilliantly. In fact, this movie is nothing but successes. On every level, Michael bay surpasses the expectations of the film community and besides his obligatory need for an explosion about every 45 seconds, Transformers stands up as his most complete and spectacular movie to date.
The action sequences in Transformers are like nothing you have ever seen before. The individual battles between Autobots and Decepticons are gigantic mechanical brawls during which the humans are usually sidelined as spectators. The amount of detail and precision in every frame of every transformation or spoken word from these mechanized behemoths is astonishing. Industrial Light & Magic has once again outdone itself, and has raised the bar for visual effects in cinema with this gigantic leap forward.
The actual story, which is in essence a condensed version of the first episodes of the television series, begins with a grandiose attack on a U.S. Air Force base in the Middle East by a particularly nasty Transformer named Blackout. Blackout, who can transform into a rouge attack helicopter, is a member of the Decepticons, one of the two rival gangs of Transformers, a race of non-biological intelligent organisms from the planet Cybertron. The Decepticons counterpart and protectors of Earth are the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime to protect Mankind from Megatron and the rest of his Decepticon mob. Highlighting the two groups of transformers are the two previously mentioned leaders Megatron and Optimus Prime, as well as a deliciously evil little gremlin named "Frenzy", who was the only Transformer created just for the film. He can transform into a small boom box, and his role in the story becomes quite significant. Besides Frenzy, there is also my personal favorite "Starscream", who perhaps went through the biggest makeover from the old television series to become an extremely cool Decepticon that transforms into an F-22 Jet. The objective of Megatron and his gang is to locate and use an ancient device that crash landed on Earth centuries ago called the All-Spark. This machine, when activated, would in essence wake-up all of the machines on Earth, and our planet would be consumed by a new dominant species of robots. Naturally, the Autobots are here to make sure that doesn't happen.
This series of events is what eventually leads to our main character...well, main HUMAN character. Samuel Witwicky, played by rising star Shia LeBouf, is a descendant of the great explorer who first discovered Megatron while he was frozen in the Arctic Circle. Megatron's message of the location of the All-Spark somehow became trapped inside Grandfather Witwicky's eyeglasses, which are now in the possession of Sam. Thus, LaBeouf and his girlfriend, played by a very sexy yet very out of place Megan Fox, are caught smack dab in the middle of an intergalactic war between gigantic robotic warlords.
Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel turn in small but fun performances as a couple of salty USAF commandos, but you won't be leaving the theater talking about how kick-ass Tyrese was in this movie. My only gripe about the story is the clearly half-cooked romance subplot between LaBeouf and Fox, but then again we've seen what happens when Michael Bay tries to include romance in his movies and its not pretty (Pearl Harbor, anybody?). As with most Michael Bay movies, there are a number of enjoyable cameos and a lot of tongue-and-cheek humor that almost kills a couple scenes, but the main attractions here are the action sequences.
Overall Tranformers delivers what it promises. Take it from a guy who has hates just about every piece of work Michael Bay has done, with the exception of The Rock: Transformers is the real deal. The action scenes are incredible, the amount of detail that went into the visual design of the characters is remarkable, and the performance turned in by Shia LeBouf helps make this a well-rounded summer blockbuster that certainly is more than meets the eye.
-Aaron Steven
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