Movie Report: Transformers

For someone of my age, the Transformers were a rite of passage. As an8-year-old boy growing up in the suburbs of a small city in North America, the Transformers were a phenomenon that dominated Saturday mornings, school recess and playdates with other kids in my second grade class. Okay, sometimes it was GI Joe and Cobra battling in Benji’s basement instead of the Autobots and Decepticons, but my favorite set of sheets was covered in a multitude of crossing stripes of varying widths and colors that made a perfect Cybertron-city-like grid on which the Autobots rolled as the Decepticons swooped down to attack. Now that my credentials are established, I will also confess that it has been a long time since I played with Soundwave and the gang, and I can’t claim any rare versions of Optimus Prime still perfectly preserved in its original packaging stashed away in a den or proudly displayed in my living room, but memories of the Transformers loom large for that crucial stage of development between ages 8 and 10. Thankfully, I moved on to bigger and better things like Star Trek TNG and girls.

As big as the Superman, Star Wars, Spiderman and X-Men franchises are, none were particularly dominant features of my actual childhood. Transformers were. I would likely trade much of my success and accomplishments to be eight again, playing with the original Jazz, although press cars are likely one aspect of life I wouldn’t willingly trade. For that matter, I wouldn’t want to trade press events either, especially when they incorporate activities like a premiere screening of Transformers, clearly one of the major movie events of summer, 2007, to which I was invited on behalf of GM, who played a pivotal role in creating the Autobots’ automotive persona for the modern day live action-CGI movie.

While I was happy just watching another overgrown child’s imagination of epic battles between Megatron and Optimus, my boss wants me to write something about the movie, and apparently without spoiling the end. But that’s okay, because there was so much going on in the film, especially with the visually explosive fight and transformation scenes, that I feel like I only processed about a third of it, and that was mostly all the catchy banter—yup, the banter was actually somewhat clever,

which if you’re a hardcore Generation 1 fan may seem odd since in rewatching a few episodes recently, I came to realize that the dialog and plotlines of the original cartoon were at best, well, childlike.

While there’s some debate and complaints of selling out by allowing product placement to infiltrate this hallowed franchise, you all can go back to playing with your original yellow Bug, the sick, rumbling V8 soundtrack alone made it worth the switch to the upcoming Chevrolet Camaro for the movies underdog robot hero, Bumblebee. It sounded awesome when I first heard it in person in Detroit two years ago, and it sounded even better in massive surround sound. It’s going to be a long wait to hear it while sitting in the driver’s seat, so I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with going to watch the movie again this weekend.

Oh, and my critique? Without getting into too many plot details, the human (Shia LaBeouf) and his first car are sympathetic characters, and just enough to draw you into the world of robots fighting it out in prolonged CGI animation battle scenes (which were so awesome I couldn’t possibly describe)… basically, the characters make jokes, get to know each other just enough to fill the space between all the robots going crshnk-chnk whnk, bam boom crashinkkinkwonkrenkink. Awesome! I almost felt like I was being transformed into and excited 8-year old. Doesn’t get any better than that, does it?