Michael Bay definitely has more than meets the eye.
The director of such bland, idiotic crap as Bad Boys, Armageddon and The Island has taken the hit toy line and 1980s cartoon series Transformers into the stratosphere of motion pictures, giving a wallop of visual punch with the bots' big screen debut.
The basic storyline has the Autobots, the good guys from the planet Cybertron, protecting the human race against extinction when their evil rivals, the Decepticons, come to earth in search of the allspark, which looks to be a giant Rubic's cube that can turn any object into a robot. This is wanted by the Decepticon leader, Megatron.
You see, all Megatron wants is the allspark...to turn all things from our planet into more of his merchants of evil. And he's already got a few: Starscream, the F-12 Raptor fighter jet; Scorponok , the giant metal, mechanical scorpion; Barricade, the police car; and Blackout, the MH-53 Pave Low helicopter.
And with the bad guys, there must be good guys. The Autobots, led by semi-truck Optimus
Prime, include Bumblebee the Camaro, Ratchet the medic Hummer, and Jazz the Pontiac Solstice.
Oh, did I mention Advertimoso, the giant General Motors advertisement? Okay, not really.
The key to saving the world lies in the ancestry of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a dorky teenage kid who is desperate for nothing more than two things: a woman and car to help him get a woman. His car, an older Camaro seems to have a mind of its own (I wonder who that might really be?), and that woman is Mikaela (Megan Fox), a tanned babe who only likes the Narcissistic jocks of the world, despite Sam going from kindergarten to high school together. Her only question for him: "Do we have any classes together?" But secret government agency Sector Seven, lead by Agent Simmons (John Turturro) want to take Bumblebee away as a threat to the country.
In the meantime, the government is on high alert after one of the bases in the Middle East was attacked by one of these alien robots, leaving Capt. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel), Technical Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson) and a small part of their battalion alive and intact. Also, Secretary of Defense John Keller (Jon Voight) believes this to be more terrorist attacks. The orders from the President of the United States? "Get me some Ding Dongs."
Yes, George Bush is in it.
With Steven Spielberg listed as executive producer, Bay has crafted a well-made story that is visually stunning (special CGI effects were done by Spielberg pal George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic). They took a few simple interchanging parts of the cartoons into a million different moving mechanisms that blend seamlessly with the humans and environment around them, as well as the actual cars that stand-in for the CGI shots.
One of Bay's trademarks is the slow-motion low-angle/close-up of an extreme emotional moment. And yet, some of those shots work here instead of boring the audience, such as during the climatic battle of Autobots vs. Decepticons. Plenty of the fights between the bots is fast and furious; Bay slows it down to show the metal clash with metal, and yet he doesn't overdo it-except with the humans. Cutting some of those out and some more can cut down on the slightly bloated running time of 144 minutes.
While many original Transformers fans may be put off by too much human involvement, all audiences will be dazzled by the great visual fabric Bay has in disguise.
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