|
|
Transformers
Mayhem
2007
Review: July 24, 2007
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rachael Taylor
YOU KNOW IT… especially during the final 30 minutes.
THE SETUP:
Buncha giant robots have big fights.
DISCUSSION:
I saw this a week and a half ago and am just now getting around to writing about it. In the meantime my memory of a lot of details—and my interest in writing about them—has dropped precipitously. Ah well, if you really wanted to see this I suspect you've gone already.
I did my best to be shitfaced off my ass for this movie—a wise choice, though I would obviously never, ever encourage anyone else to take any kind of substance—and yet despite downing an entire flask of Vodka, I felt at most barely a faint buzz. At times. Cheap vodka? Perhaps. Anyway, too bad, it would have been awesome. You may succeed where I failed.
Anyway, to the movie. I was warned by a review early on that the first hour was teen rom-com, and that did prove to be the case. So first this helicopter comes to this encampment in Iraq—SO timely—and transforms into something and blows the whole place away while stealing something. And obviously the Pentagon is in a big snit about this, and gather a bunch of hackers and whatnot to try to decode it. Then we join Shia The Beef as Sam, whose dad is going to buy him a car, and he gets this car, and he's in love with this gorgeous girl, and she barely pays attention to him, then he gives her a ride, and the car goes all Herbie and plays appropriate songs, blah, blah, blah, teen romance develops, etc. And eventually Sam realizes that his car is alive, and at first he's afraid of it, blah, blah, do we HAVE to talk about this? You know what, let's skip it and just hit the highlights.
The girl Sam likes, named Mikaela and played by Megan Fox, is so gorgeous it's distracting. There's another ludicrously gorgeous woman on the hacker team assembled by the Pentagon—and you'll notice that she apparently DID pack her lip gloss before heading off to the Pentagon. I was also amazed at the sheer amount of opportunities for product placement that present themselves in the environments of the Pentagon and Air Force One. I must say that IS one thing I associate with Michael Bay films: outrageous product placement. The other Michael Bay tropes are definitely solidly in place: unapologetic leering at women, the whole 14-year-old boy fantasy about the geek ending up with someone who looks like a supermodel, and a general beer-commercial mentality. We'll get back to this.
So after awhile the transformers reveal themselves to Sam and Mikaela and they realize that they have to get these glasses that belonged to Sam’s grandfather that are going to tell them where the Borg cube is and blah, blah, blah, I just can’t even be bothered to go into it. As I said, I saw this a week and a half ago and yet it seems like several years. As I try to remember what happened in the movie, a part of my brain is saying “Ugh, why do you want to think about THAT?”
Anyway, it all leads, in a way that seems relatively logical at the time but in retrospect feels totally haphazard and pointlessly drawn out, to the Hoover Dam. Now, please don’t show the the Hoover Dam unless you intend to blow that shit up. There’s some bullshit about the giant cube and that’s where they wake up the main bad transformer, and they all head into downtown LA to have their big showdown.
This is what the movie is leading up to and is the main point of the movie. The final 20 minutes are so—something—and I think that’s why, in retrospect, the entire two hours leading up to them seem like such pointless bullshit. What happens is they have this massive giant robot showdown, destroying everything in their path, and this is the shit I came here to see. Bay has seemingly consciously gone for a rhythm in which so much is going on at once, he generates a kind of vicarious experience of being in the battle simply overwhelming the senses and making your mind do its best to figure out what’s going on. You will also notice that even with giant robots, the black one—who speaks in an affectation of “jive” that is embarrassing to humanity—dies first. Everything is flying everywhere, fighter jets are turning into robots and back in the space of seconds, missles here, punches there, etc., that it does become a little dumbfounding. You will notice that the populous of LA decides to just hang out and chill in the streets, avoiding the crush of massive robot limbs when they must, rather than just clear out altogether. This is when I really wished my vodka buzz was going to be at full strength, but had to face the disppointment of watching the scene unfold while completely sober.
Once the movie is over it evaporates in one’s brain, leaving only an unsightly residue. I have barely thought about it since then, which is why it seems to irrelevant now. I will say that the Michael Bay “I’m an idiot frat boy—whoooooo!” mentality that pervades all his films, while certainly in place here—comes off as less offensive this time, and I think that is because we’re talking about giant robots, and there are fewer humans on hand. So it’s that much further distanced from reality. Not to mention that the few humans who are here are spread out thin and don’t make much of an impression anyway.
So yeah, total popcorn. You munch it and then it vanishes and you never think about it again. I would be happy to watch that last 20 minutes again, but there’s no possible way I could sit through the rest of the movie more than once.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you want.
