Darn You, Michael Bay! A Transformers Review

Any time you find yourself wandering around deep with in the cavernous world wide web and you find yourself with in ear shot of any site that might even remotely deal with or link to a site were fans of movies, comic books, science fiction, TV, cartoons, collectibles, or video games air their thoughts...the faintest cry of "Damn you Michael Bay" may echo it's way off the walls and into your hearing. In fact, if you hear one, you'll likely hear several. It's become a sort of chant amongst the Transformers faithful. A mantra.

Well, I just saw Transformers, myself a fan of the characters going back to the beginning in 1984 and the comic book mini-series. Optimus Prime (heroic leader of the Autobots) is a father figure to me and I happen to have a pretty great dad as it is. Despite that, Prime is one of the most influential fictional characters in my life. He ranks high, right up there with Aragorn and Samwise Gamgee, Guy Montag, the Great Lion - Aslan, Jim Caviezel's portrayal of Private Witt in The Thin Red Line, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Yoda, Rhett Butler, Batman, Rocky Balboa, the list goes on. I'm a faux geek. I fall in love with the spirit of certain stories and characters but I've never found a way to sell me self over to collecting myself into bliss by watching, reading, and seeing it all. I'll be the first to admit that I sometimes feel very, very passionate about how source material (books, comics, cartoons, actual history) is treated as it is adapted into film. Other times, I just don't get it being that important to complain and rant about such things when there are many other more important matters going on in this world, even when it's source material that is important to me. I understand the need to ADAPT when adapting something. Some changes are made and the only real wrong is a difference in opinion, how can one be write about art all the time. Other times, the stupid times, changes are made for any number of stupid, uneducated, or plain shallow reasons.

At the end of the day, changes can be made. As long as you get the spirit right. Who the characters are, the important ones can't change. The spirit of the story and the characters needs (there I go, who says I know anything...) to stay intact. Did that happen with Transformers? Yes and no.

I tell you all of this so you know where I'm coming from. What kind of credibility I have and what kind of credibility I lack, depending on your point of view. So for me, it's not, "DAMN YOU, MICHAEL BAY." For me, it's a, "Darn you, Michael Bay." But it's a pretty strong, "Darn."

In a nutshell, without giving anything away, what I saw was a good movie twisted up with a decent one. The action, every bit of it, was perfect. That IS a Transformers movie. Could not have been better. The problem for me is the Transformers seemed like guest stars in their own movie. I don't care if they looked different or changed into something else, but they weren't really real characters for the most part. Aside from Bumblebee and Prime (and even they were weaker than necessary), they were no more than their cartoon counterparts, if even less than that. You want a movie to elevate the material a bit. I know a toy line is involved and we've got to sell the stuff but it could have been better. Probably the best and worst things about this movie likely reside with its director, Michael Bay. I was pretty excited about the writers and producers for the most part (especially Steven Spielberg and Tom DeSanto). Bay could be hit or miss, I was just really hoping we'd get more than we got. To me, the military aspect could have been there but much less focused on. Transformers should have been about a boy and his car. Keeping the soldiers wasn't a bad idea but the heavy inclusion of silly government agents (although John Turturro is a great actor), completely unnecessary computer hacker characters, and a government think tank of generals and such really took the movie in too many directions.

In an interview with EW.com, Bay said that before he got on board, Spielberg had the writers working on the film, focusing on a boy and his car. Quoting Bay when asked about the original theme being about a boy and his car, "Yeah. That was the hook to the movie. But I added a stronger military thing at the beginning to make it more, I guess, badass, to make the stakes higher. But originally the tone was very suburbia. We kind of changed that and made it edgier."

He does go on to say he liked the suburbia element and shot those scenes in a specific way. And you know what, I liked the way he did it. But, what I know is that if the world had been treated as seriously as the worlds in Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, X-Men, or Star Wars (first three anyway) and especially Batman Begins then we'd have something entirely different on our hands. Instead of a pretty cool action movie, we'd have a classic on our hands. Look at it, those movies also have preposterous ideas in them as well but fiction is both fun and brutally deep and real when you inject some form of fantasy into them. Many of the best stories are told that way.

If you just go off of the cartoon, then yeah, you get a cartoon. But if you go off of the entire mythology, especially from the comic books where, gasp, you had entire issues or story lines with no humans. The Transformers were the characters. They had hate and hurt and greed and grief and pathos and love...you can make anything work if you want to. I remember being very emotionally impacted when after a battle in the comic, Optimus grieved for the aliens (wasn't on Earth at the time) that were killed as he succeeded in defeating his foe. Life mattered to Prime. We could have seen that here. Wouldn't have been as sexy, but it would have been more memorable.

So, this is what I get for feeling so strongly about a toy line that somehow become something more to a lot of people.

I think I'll like the movie more later, I mean, I smiled through most of it. But until you're thinking and feeling for and about Starscream, Prime, Megatron, and poor Jazz (even with those silly names) just as much as the human's and you see them as real, fully formed characters. I will be disappointed.

But I'm just one man and plenty of people, especially non-transformer fans really dig it. I can't argue with that. I just feel, and maybe it's just me, that you could have had just as many people (or more) dig it if it had been a little less...well, I'm going to say...dumb.

Just a little.