Transformers

There's not a lot of back story to Transformers (2007), or at least I didn't pick up on much of one. This film is fun to watch, more so in the first half than the second, but it's important not to think about it much. Just watch it. The first half is more interesting because it dramatizes a teenage boy's discovery that his run-down Camero is actually an alien robot that has come to earth along with a group of similar friends in search of an alien power source. Once the film finishes introducing the good transformers, such as Optimus Prime, it bogs down a bit in increasingly complicated exposition. It turns out that the government has known about the transformers for fifty years, that the leader of the evil transformers was discovered frozen in the Arctic by the boy's grandfather, and that eyeglasses belonging to boy's grandfather provide missing evidence that brings the transformers to earth in search of the power source.

My sons who were young in the 1980s played with transformer toys. That is how I became familiar with them. There is not much of a mythic framework behind or beneath the transformers. There are simply some good ones that want to help and defend the human race and some bad ones that want to destroy it. The same is pretty much true in this film. Good vs. evil on the shallowest levels.

Politically, the film is deluded and reactionary. The American military shoots at the evil robots with weapons that have pinpoint accuracy. Hasn't our experience in the Iraqi wars of 1990 and 2002 more or less proved that such weapons don't exist?

Commercially, the film is about product placement, as others have noted. The transformers apparently made a deal with General Motors—the robots agreed to transform into GM cars. No foreign models, especially no Japanese models, which is ironic given the origins of the transformer cartoon series and of the transformer toys themselves. Also, it turns out, if the power source is activated, certain mechanical devices (such as Nokia cell phones) will transform into evil robots. Foreign devices in this case are allowed.

Two sources of action in the film: when the transformers transform, and when they fly and rumble around shooting at each other. That's how this film solves problems—alien robots shoot at one another and whatever buildings happen to be nearby. It is on that level that you must watch the film. On that level, and not any other, it is actually entertaining.

Despite the digital and other types of moviemaking technology brought to bear on the film, there are a number of moments in the latter half, when the good and the evil transformers are battling each other, that you know you are looking at men in rubber suits.