Transformers kept at bay

What a slugfest!

Crash! Boom! Bang! Action-geeks gotta love it! Boys who grow old wept as they see their favorite robots immortalized on the silver screen. In a cinematic world, there are no men. Boys just grow old.

If there is anything wrong with the movie, Michael Bay is the biggest villain bigger than Megatron himself. Actually the biggest robot in the movie is Blackout, the chopper which flew into the military base and decimated almost everyone at the start of the film. He is so big that scorpion thingy robot Scorponok can hitch a ride. Bay’s style of direction though left me frustrated because I felt cheated that the action sequences were too fast and furious. It was difficult to distinguish between the Autobots and Decepticons during the climatic battles and boy, you wouldn’t want to get caught in between those fights. The noise itself will render you deaf. The final quarter of the movie is purely a relentless assault of heavy-metal bashing, clanging and explosions you may get from a nearby construction yard and a packed coffeeshop combined.

To be fair, Bay did a fantastic job on the robots nonetheless but the story is simply limp, riddled with loopholes. For example, it took the Decepticons so long to find the location of the Allspark until now? Perhaps under the leadership of Starscream the results were inevitably poor and speaking of which, the Decepticons had little screen time as compared to the Autobots. There is little interaction between the baddies (although the legendary rift between Megatron and Starscream is still there). I do believe if Transformers were to be made into a mini-series like Band of Brothers, it will be far more successful and interesting. Although the movie is over two hours, I felt that the storyline is rather rushed and lacked characterizations.

There are silly scenes where the Autobots lurk and prance around Sam’s backyard and no one in the neighborhood was able to see those behemoth machines. Silly scenes like these kill the movie quite easily. No thanks to the scriptwriters albeit Shia Lebouf’s performance is above par. Throw in a comic relief in the form of the fat computer hacker Anthony Anderson managed to sneak in a few laughs. Josh Duhamel does nothing spectacular except riding a bike to slide in and shoot Blackout in the balls (was that really necessary?) and Megan Fox reveals nothing more about her acting except her deep cleavage. Worse, Hugo Weaving’s voice is seriously under-used as the legendary Megatron and restricted to a few lines. One can still remember his brilliant voice-acting in the political thriller V for Vendetta. Even Starscream sounded different because the original voice-actor Chris Latta died in ‘94 and the robot now looks like an ape. The Decepticon 2nd in-command came awfully late into the final phase of the movie and by then the battle-scenes take full swing. Thankfully the overall CGI is excellent and I simply hate the jerking camera movements which did so much injustice to the cinematic brilliance.

I loved Transformers as a kid. The fully animated feature film in ‘86 was magical. This new one is shockingly awesome but that is just it. The full potential of the movie, the robots and its plot held at bay. If you had seen Armageddon many years ago, Transformers is no different. Minus the robots. It is Bay’s style that underplayed the movie, let down by a poor storytelling.