Not much more than meets the eye
When a movie starts out with a credit saying it was made in
association with Hasbro, a toy manufacturing company, you’ve got to
know you aren’t in for a classic. I’ve seen movies based on TV
series, fairytales, books, video games and Disney even pulled off
at least one good movie based on an amusement park ride
– the first
”
Pirates of the Caribbean.
”
But a full-length movie based on an action figure kinda
stretches the boundaries of story-telling.
Not much more than meets the eye
When a movie starts out with a credit saying it was made in association with Hasbro, a toy manufacturing company, you’ve got to know you aren’t in for a classic. I’ve seen movies based on TV series, fairytales, books, video games and Disney even pulled off at least one good movie based on an amusement park ride – the first “Pirates of the Caribbean.” But a full-length movie based on an action figure kinda stretches the boundaries of story-telling.
“Transformers” is just such a movie. Now I grew up when the cartoon was on the airwaves and since I had a tomboy sister and a couple of male cousins close in age, I watched an episode or two. We had miniature versions of the Autobots that we could “transform” from a robot into cars or trucks. The cartoon and the toys were certainly not the most popular of the era as they came in after “Strawberry Shortcake”, “He-Man and She-Ra”, “My Little Pony” and even the “Care Bears” in the rankings – at least in my family.
Now for those who don’t remember the cartoon or haven’t seen the movie – don’t worry – it’s easy to tell the good bots from the bad bots in the movie. The bad bots are known as “Decepticons” – they have to be bad with a name like that – and they are all silver metal and sharp edges.
The good guys can only transform into GM vehicles and they have smooth edges and bright colors.
So now that you know how to tell the good guys from the bad guys – you can safely see the movie, though once I get done with the plot issues, you might not want to. Well, the thing with a movie based on a toy is that it comes with a whole lot of plot holes – some big enough to drive transformer-sized vehicles through. Basically, the “Transformers” destroyed their own planet a long time ago and now the bad guys want to destroy Earth in an attempt to find something called an “all spark.” It’s never very clear what the “all spark” will do for them, but the bad guys really want it and the good guys need to get to it before Megatron – leader of the bad guys – gets it.
Enter Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf starred on a Disney Channel show called “Even Stevens,” where he was the goofy, youngest son in a family from Sacramento. He always had hair-brained schemes that drove his older siblings crazy, made his parents hair stand on edge and nearly destroyed his friendships. It was a funny show.
The thing is Sam Witwicky is basically just an older version of Louis Stevens. Sam wants a car and his dad says he needs to come up with $2,000 so he hocks some old stuff that belonged to his grandfather from an Arctic – or Antarctic, somewhere where there is a lot of ice – expedition to come up with the money. In the end his dad gets him a beat-up yellow Camaro, which surprise, surprise, is actually a transformer.
The movie has a split personality in that when LaBeouf is on the screen with his gorgeous love interest Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) the movie wants to be a comedy. When the U. S. military is fighting the bad robots, it wants to be an action flick. The result is that the movie has a few good laughs and a lot of explosions, but it’s barely mediocre.
And the other thing that is really annoying about the movie is the blatant product placement. There was a Porsche dealership, a Hummer dealership and all of the good bots transformed into GMC vehicles. And then there is Witwicky’s yellow Camaro, which becomes all shiny and new halfway through the movie.
In case you didn’t pick up on it before, the plot holes in this movie are plentiful enough to drive every one of those transformer cars through, but I guess the point of action movies is to suspend one’s belief in reality – especially when the action movie is based on a toy.
So here are just a few more of the things I don’t get.
Megatron crashed landed in the early 20th Century on Earth so why did the Decepticons and the Autobots wait so long to look for him and the all spark?
Bumblebee, one of the Autobots who is also Witwicky’s yellow camaro, is supposed to be his guardian. But why was he on Earth before all the other good guys?
And if Sector Seven, the government agency that knows all about the transformers is so secret and powerful that not even the defense secretary knows about them, why did it take them so long to get wind of Witwicky’s dealings with the Autobots?
And the biggest question of all – how could the casting directors really think we would believe that someone like Megan Fox – who was named to “FHM’s” 100 sexiest women in the world list – would really fall for a dorky kid like Shia LaBeouf, even if he was saving the world from Megatron?
