Transformers Review

Michael Bay’s Transformers is my childhood come to life. As a Transformers fan, I felt both excitement and hesitation when this project was announced; excitement because it was the Transformers being made into a live action movie; hesitation because I feared some studio executive was going to piss on my childhood and would green light a movie that was like 1998’s Godzilla. Luckily, Steven Spielberg came on board as executive producer. But to every yin there’s a yang: in this case, Michael Bay as director. The result is a highly stylized film whose good far outweighs its bad. I was six years old again and I loved it.

The plot is simple: Sam “Spikeâ€? Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) wants to auction off his great grandfather’s hand-me-down’s on eBay to pay for a used yellow Camaro so he can woo Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox, who can jump start my car any time it breaks down) the most popular girl in school. Little does he know that his used car is Bumblebee, a robot in disguise who is searching for him because his eBay items contained a map to the All Spark; the source of life on the planet Cybertron. The All Spark was lost in a war between the heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons and after traveling for centuries through space has brought their war to Earth.

If Superman made you believe a man could fly then Transformers will make you believe a car can transform. Bay realized that at certain angles Computer Generated Images look fake, so the robots are a combination of CGI and constructed pieces. The result is photo realistic characters that move fluidly. They blend in with their environment so well that you really believe Autobots are roaming the Earth. The sound effects team should also be praised. For whenever a punch is thrown by the robots, the sound makes you feel the impact.

Transformers, though, does have its flaws. There are times when the action moves so fast that you can’t see what’s going on. Just when the films momentum is swinging in the direction of one storyline Bay has a tendency to cut to another. This will becomes very irritating in the final battle. But the biggest flaw is obviously in characterization. Not in the human characters, surprisingly they were developed, and not in the Autobots, but in the Decepticons. With exception of Megatron, The Decepticons came off personality wise like the Stormtroopers in Star Wars. I was hoping to see Starscream make at least one attempt on Megatron’s life just like he always did in the cartoon.

Despite its flaws, Transformers is fun, and entertaining. The movie will have you clapping and cheering throughout its two-hour-and-twenty-minute run time. It truly is “more than meets the eye.â€?