Transformers: A Long, Strange Trip

“It’s about Martians who come to Earth and disguise themselves as everyday appliances.”

David Letterman’s description of Transformers generally sums up the layman’s take on it. So let me share with you the long and arduous journey of a lifelong Transformers fan and how Michael Bay became the frustrating harbinger of both doom and delight.

In 1984, there were these awesome little robots that turned into cars and jets and stuff. They were called Go-Bots. Then I saw a cartoon about bigger awesome robots that turned into cars and jets and stuff, including one that turned into a tape deck and little cassettes came out of his chest and turned into robots and birds and stuff, and I left the Go-Bots behind and became a full-fledged Transformers fan for years (and their theme song was a heck of a lot cooler, too). And any Transformers fan will tell you that the most annoying thing about the old cartoon were all the humans. Nobody wanted to see the humans - they wanted to see the big, colorful robots, each with their own bombastic personalities.

The reason this property still has the rabid cult following it has today is because of the 1986 animated classic The Transformers: The Movie. Yes, it was a hodge-podge of sci-fi clichés, with nearly every character having a parallel to Star Wars or, in the case of this ingenious YouTube video, Lord of the Rings.. That’s not the point. As opposed to most bright and boring kids’ fare, this movie was darker in tone than the show was, it featured gruesome and saddening deaths of beloved characters like Optimus Prime, the animation was kicked up several notches and it had an amazing-yet-bewildering all-star cast, featuring Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy and the last performance of Orson Welles (who would later describe this job as “playing a toy” in a movie about toys “who do horrible things to each other”). The film didn’t make much money, but for the devoted followers who saw it, it was burned into our minds as an introduction into somewhat more adult themes, like death and the true cost of war.

For the next 20 years, Transformers went through many permutations to reinvent itself, some good, many not so good, but the faithful knew what would really be the coup de grâce. The live-action movie. They had to wait for CG technology to be good enough to support it, but it would, of course, be the awesomest thing that ever awesomed. When word got out that producer Don Murphy had gotten the rights and was raring to go, people got interested. When Steven Spielberg’s name became attached, people went bug-eyed with excitement, until they realized he wouldn’t be directing. When Bay’s name surfaced as the helmer, reaction was split between the “oh, god, yes!” and “oh, god, no!” camps.

You see, Michael Bay is not known for making good movies. He’s known for making Armageddon. His attempts at good movies turn out like Pearl Harbor. Films that look really good, and have amazing action sequences, but with painful attempts at characterization and dialog. Bay’s penchant for movies that are huge in scope and full of explosions is great for a movie about giant alien robots fighting a civil war with each other. When one remembers the bombastic fun of The Rock and the Bad Boys movies, one can get excited about the potential visual insanity that Bay’s Transformers could bring.

Then, they kept casting human characters. In the show, there were two human regulars, and maybe three more occasionally recurring humans. That’s it. The show was about the Transformers themselves. Shia LaBeouf, Bernie Mac, Anthony Anderson, John Turturro, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight, Tyrese Gibson, Meagan Fox, Kevin Dunn… the more people being cast in non-human roles, the more we had to expect that the movie would get bogged down with Bay’s weak spots, and we wouldn’t get enough of the robots.

Then Peter Cullen was announced to be reprising his role as the venerable voice of Autobot commander Optimus Prime, and fans breathed a little easier. They were guaranteed at least one bright spot. Hugo Weaving had enough fanboy cred that he could be forgiven for eking out Frank Welker as the voice of Megatron, leader of the evil Decepticons. Okay, it seemed like they were on the right track again.

Until the character designs were revealed to be incredibly drastic departures from what fans had hoped. Some changes had to be made to update things, certainly, but the fact that they all looked like rickety Tinker Toys rather than sturdy warriors made a lot of people cry foul. The fact that most of them weren’t any more colorful than primer paint was also disconcerting, and the complete inability to recognize several characters made the internet howl with rage, as it is wont to do. Optimus Prime, a character almost Shakespearean in his nobility, was now decked out in redneck flame decals in his truck mode. Megatron looked like a stack of gray pasta, with a mouth that looked like an alien insect’s anus. With several of these character shots, you had to stare at it for a good minute before you could actually locate the robot’s head. Outrage and fury spilled into the streets!

But then the trailers came out, which is Bay’s strongest suit. The robots moved fluidly, they looked real (if they still looked ugly), and the reality of the live-action Transformers movie dawned on the faithful. It looked exciting, in spite of everything that was wrong with it. The consensus finally came to be that it wouldn’t be a good movie, but it could at least be fun, which is all you can hope for out of a Bay movie.

And that’s what we got. A spectacular visual feast full of interchangeable, throwaway characters that no one ever managed to care about. Incredibly rendered fighting robots wrapped up in incredibly inane plot points. Pulse-pounding, intense action interspersed with painfully bad attempts at comedy. But in summer blockbuster fare, that’s enough to satisfy most people.

I could go on and on about specific frustrations - such as how the little CD-player guy Frenzy was an annoying cross between one of the Gremlins and Johnny Five from Short Circuit, or how the Sgt. Duhamel’s brilliant plan is to take the weird box that GIANT ALIEN DEATH ROBOTS want so badly and run it right into the middle of a heavily populated area, or how the robots in combat are occasionally just look like big piles of squirming junk until you suddenly notice a hand jutting out - but that belabors the point.

The series this movie is based on was never the masterpiece we like to remember it as being, but this movie is just a completely different animal, to use a trite phrase. Geared at teens instead of kids, it’s more obnoxious and features a robot urinating on John Turturro. This is Michael Bay’s milieu.