It really was inevitable, wasn’t it? A live-action Transformers was bound to happen at some point. The Hollywood machine craves content, and an 80s relic about cars turning into robots that can also be turned into toys has dollar signs written all over it. To quote Steven Spielberg’s Freakazoid, “How toyetic can ya get?!”
And speaking of Spielberg, the man Michael Bay had been chasing for the last 15 years, he finally gave Bay his shot at the title of King of the Summer Blockbusters. Released July 4th, 2007, Transformers landed in the middle of a movie season littered with competition. Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shrek 3, Bourne Identity 3, Ocean’s 11 3, Die Hard 4, Harry Potter 5, and Ratatouille were all vying for our movie dollars, and pretty much all of them were winners, financially speaking. This was a time when everyone just went to see everything because what the hell else were we gonna do? Scroll the internet on our flip phones?
Transformers hit the scene at the intersection of a few different trends. The 80s nostalgia train, the mid-aughts meme culture, and the early days of movie studios trying to wield geek culture like a cudgel against the media landscape. And in the middle of all of that, Hasbro decided to get into the movie business. They originally wanted a live-action G.I. Joe movie. The 2003 invasion of Iraq put a damper on those plans, so Hasbro pivoted to the less tone deaf idea of giving Transformers the live-action blockbuster treatment. (These concerns seem even sillier considering the G.I. Joe movie we actually got in 2009.) You know Transformers, the 80s toy line masquerading as a cartoon about cars that turn into robots, and also they’re aliens for some reason? Let’s make it into a Spielbergian, four-quadrant summer action movie for the whole family!
Spielberg himself got involved real quick, tapping Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman to write a version of Transformers that turned the intergalactic war between Autobots and Decepticons into a simply story of a boy and his dog (that is also a car). This decision, ultimately, turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. He also brought in Michael Bay, who had to be convinced that this kiddie shit wasn’t actually kiddie shit. When Bay realized he’d be allowed to play in the sandbox of US military hardware, he was all in. And you can tell that’s where his heart was, because any time not spent on Shia LeBeouf yelling at a car is spent on sweeping helicopter shots of other, cooler helicopters. Transformers is basically helicopters all the way down.
On the one hand, I really don’t want to recount the plot of Transformers, because it’s not interesting in the slightest. But unfortunately, I have to, because one of the problems with the movie is that the plot is too complicated by half, and the only way I can illustrate this is by breaking it down in excruciating detail. Buckle up, friendominos, cuz we’re going for a ride!
The movie opens on a US military base in Qatar where a mysterious helicopter makes an unsanctioned landing. It’s identified as a helicopter shot down months earlier, and as soon as they realize this, it transforms into the Decepticon Blackout, who attacks the base and taps into its database for information regarding the whereabouts of a power source called The Allspark.
Cut to a high school classroom where we meet our hero, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), a motormouthed little shithead who uses a history presentation of his great grandfather’s arctic expeditions as an opportunity to hawk family heirlooms for money. Sam desperately wants to earn enough money to buy his first car, and his dad (Kevin Dunn) agrees to front half the cash at Bernie Mac’s used car lot for an old yellow Camaro that we quickly deduce is the Autobot Bumblebee. Bumblebee has found his way to Sam, because Sam is in possession of a pair of his great granddad’s glasses, which are imprinted with the exact coordinates of the Allspark. Bumblebee, along with all the other robots, figures this out because Sam listed the glasses on eBay under the handle LadiesMan217. The movie repeatedly points this out, I guess because it’s funny to hear a giant robot call someone “LadiesMan217”.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Keller (Pearl Harbor‘s Jon Voight) has assembled a team of the country’s finest nerds to help figure out who’s hacking into government servers and why. We, of course, already know the answer to this, but these scenes only serve to introduce impossibly attractive hacker Maggie (Rachael Taylor) and her squad of neckbeards, who we’ll be spending an inordinate amount of time watching learn things the audience already knows.
Returning to Sam and Bumblebee, Sam seizes an opportunity to pick up his smokeshow classmate Mikaela (Bad Boys II‘s Megan Fox1), who’s just dumped her dumb jock boyfriend. The meet-cute goes about as awkwardly as it possibly could, as she thinks he’s new in town and he explains that they’ve been in every class together for the past ten years. This is not helped by the fact that Sam, and by extension the movie itself, cannot stop leering at Mikaela. In fact, anytime she’s onscreen the camera is either lingering on her curves, or gazing up at her face. It’s even more pronounced because Megan Fox has absolutely nothing to do in this movie. She’s the human eye candy for anyone unimpressed by the explosions or CG robots, and it could not be more obvious that she realizes this.
Meanwhile, the sole survivors of the Qatar attack make their way to the nearest village to radio for help. Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his team are waylaid by Decepticon Scorponok, which gets them on SecDef Keller’s radar. At the same time, another smaller Decepticon named Frenzy infiltrates Air Force One to try and break into the government database from there. This scene is our only real signpost of the era, as we briefly hear an unseen President George W. Bush asking a stewardess to bring him a ding dong. Both of these incidents put Maggie in the room with Keller and Admiral Brigham (Armageddon/The Island‘s Chris Ellis), who both find out real quick that she’s right, and aliens are definitely hacking the internet for some reason. This entire paragraph only exists to illustrate how brain-meltingly complicated and utterly inessential half the plot of this fucking movie is. And we’re just getting started.
Meanwhile, Sam finally discovers Bumblebee is actually a giant robot just in time to need rescuing when he’s chased down by Barricade, a Decepticon disguised as a police car. Mikaela gets involved, because Sam is just acting so goddamn weird and she has to know why. Bumblebee has sent out a beacon to the other Autobots, who enter the movie by crash landing all over Los Angeles in a display that one dumbass kid says is way cooler than Armageddon. Optimus Prime (voiced by original voice actor Peter Cullen) finally makes his grand entrance 1200 words into this review, and explains the backstory, about how the Autobots’ war against the Decepticons destroyed their home planet, and the Allspark found its way to Earth thousands of years ago. We also learn that the evil Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving) followed the cube to Earth, became frozen in the Arctic ice, and was subsequently discovered by Sam’s great grandfather.
Plot lines begin to collide when John Turturro shows up as Agent Simmons, arresting Sam and Mikaela on behalf of a secret government agency named Sector Seven, who reveal that they’ve been keeping Megatron on ice underneath the Hoover Dam since the 1930s. They also capture Bumblebee and begin experimenting on him, because we needed a reminder that this is still an alien invasion movie and we have to torture one of the good aliens to show that humans don’t deserve to live.
Sam and Simmons have this dumb little face-off where they argue over whether the giant robot’s name is Megatron or Non-Biological Entity #1. This Simmons guy… Turturro plays him like he’s in a comedy, which to be fair he kind of is, but there’s this weirdly aggro undertone to the whole performance that makes him just seem really pathetic. It all comes to a head when Lennox (seriously, every character shows up at the Hoover Dam) threatens to shoot Simmons if he doesn’t release Bumblebee. “I don’t take orders from guys who don’t exist!” That exchange is a microcosm of the series’ entire political outlook: Bay loves the military, but boy oh boy does he hate the government.
All the robots converge on the Hoover Dam, where Megatron finally breaks free. Unable to find a giant gun to transform into, Megatron takes the form of a fighter jet, but specifically an alien one so we don’t confuse him with his second-in-command, Starscream, who transforms into an F-22 Raptor. The Allspark shrinks down into a conveniently football-sized cube, and everyone takes off to Mission City (played by Los Angeles) for the big final showdown. On the freeway, Optimus Prime tangles with Bonecrusher, who attacks the Autobot convoy by throwing cars and shit all over the highway, which at this point I’m convinced is Michael Bay’s go-to action scene move, having now pulled this exact same stunt three films in a row. Prime bests Bonecrusher in combat, and by ‘bests in combat’ I of course mean ‘cuts off the top half of Bonecrusher’s head’. But they’re both CG robots, so the movie is still comfortably PG-13.
The finale is one long explosion where the Autobots and Decepticons do battle in the streets of Los Angeles. Sam runs downfield with the Allspark like a wide receiver racing to an endzone that doesn’t exist, while Mikaela drives a tow truck backwards through town so that a wounded Bumblebee can still shoot people. Megatron rips the Autobot Jazz right in half. Starscream disguises himself as an F-22 Raptor and takes down a bunch of real F-22 Raptors. On the DVD’s audio commentary, Michael Bay brags about this scene and how he was able to secure multiple real F-22s for his movie, while poor wittle Wive Fwee or Die Hawd could only afford one F-35.
The whole movie is one long dick measuring contest, and it is utterly exhausting. Bay is to blame for a lot of this, because he just can’t help himself around all this military hardware and all these cool cars. It’s just the kind of guy he is. And then you’ve got Shia LeBeouf, who plays Sam like the living embodiment of flop sweat. Every scene involves him running his mouth while saying absolutely nothing, moving and screaming and desperately trying to will the movie’s conflicts into a state of being totally okay just so he won’t get grounded. We’re supposed to connect with him because he’s exactly the kid this movie is geared toward, but Sam is just tragically unlikeable and desperate for attention. I 100% believe this character will give himself a heart attack at the age of 27 when his parents suddenly realize Transformers exist and he has to stand there and pretend Bumblebee is just a figment of their imagination.
Transformers is an exhausting experience masquerading as a real movie. The bones of that real movie are there, but it’s all hidden underneath so much digital noise and interlocking machine parts. Spielberg’s instinct to make this a movie about Sam and Bumblebee was the right one, because otherwise there would be nothing even remotely human for us to latch onto (see also Bumblebee, a movie that actually makes this dynamic work). The monkey’s paw curled when they cast Shia LeBeouf, who seems convinced that talking fast is the same as acting, and that a neurotic kid would be more endearing than a normal, well-adjusted one.
I don’t want to say Michael Bay was the wrong choice for this material, partly because the man really knows how to shoot a good looking car commercial. The other part is that I just don’t want to know what someone else’s Transformers would have looked like. For all the movie’s flaws in logic, cringe-inducing performances, and far-too-complicated plotting, I honestly don’t see this movie working any other way. Transformers, for better or for worse, is exactly the movie it needed to be, and the fact that there are four more of these fucking things in my future is plenty proof of that. I’m not saying Transformers is a good movie, and I can’t really say I enjoyed revisiting it 17 years later, but something about it has certainly become indelible. The “Bayformers”, as idiots have taken to calling them, are here to stay.
Transformers came in fifth at the annual box office for 2007. $709 million was more than enough to greenlight a sequel. Bay was now in the Transformers business, and he had no intention of slowing down.
NEXT TIME: Optimus Prime will return in one of the most unpleasant movies ever made.
- The Megan Fox/Michael Bay situation is… icky, to say the least. Fox first appeared in Bad Boys II as an uncredited extra in a nightclub scene, where Bay decided it was less of an issue for a 15-year-old Fox to be dancing in a bikini rather than drinking at the bar. In the Transformers movies, it’s been said that Bay often directed Fox to “just be sexy”. She never alleged any misconduct or inappropriateness on his part, but the way the movie treats her speaks for itself. In a word: Icky.
It’s also been pointed out that Fox’s character, Mikaela Banes, is almost certainly named after Michael Bay. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. ↩︎
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