Toward the end of
Transformers, the latest overblown summer epic from explosion-maestro extraordinaire, Michael Bay, two giant robots in the midst of one of the film’s countless robo-rumbles tumble off a highway overpass and crash into a stream of traffic below. Tires screech, metal crumples, and glass shatters in a storm of sure-to-be extremely expensive vehicular destruction. For a young boy in a nearby car, however, there’s only one thing to do: Point out the window and exclaim, “Cool, Mom!” The mother screams in fear, but the kid’s gleeful shout is the only appropriate reaction — both to the ensuing robot-on-robot fracas and, indeed, the entire movie. Mothers and other authority figures may recoil in horror at the gargantuan, incoherent, violent mess of a movie Bay has loosed on the world, but boys the world over know that, no matter how incoherent, inane, and willfully ludicrous it is,
Transformers is just plain cool.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This is especially true if you’re a mid-20s male whose childhood idea of a perfect Saturday morning involved spooning sugary cereal and zonking out to animated toy commercials like the one on which the movie was based. This, even more than most teen-oriented popcorn flicks, is a movie for boys and the men who wish they never had to grow up, a smorgasbord of youthful male wish fulfillment, in which geeks get the girl and a kid’s first car turns out to be a giant super-powered robot fighting machine. It’s a gaudy, $200 million nostalgia trip, an overstuffed, over-the-top paean to brain-fried boyhood, and it’s both as fancifully sincere and utterly nonsensical as any overstimulated eight-year-old’s midsummer daydream. By any reasonable critical standard, it’s a lousy film. But as adolescent fantasy, it’s glorious.
Of course, one ought to expect no less coming from the reigning king of frenetic cinematic spectacle, Michael Bay. As a director, Bay has long been an advocate for the unsupervised imaginations of geeky boys everywhere. In films like
The Rock, Bad Boys, and
Armageddon, Bay has taken up the cause of Big, Loud, and Ridiculous, positioning himself as the silver screen’s loudest and showiest testosterone partisan. He traffics almost exclusively in militaristic, mechanized action spectaculars in which raunchy boy’s clubs are called upon to save the world. He loves expensive hardware, lavishing a nearly lustful attention on everything from sports cars to spaceships to military helicopters, and loves to blow them up. And he has an appropriately short attention span — his erratic, twitchy editing moves at the speed and rhythm of an Xbox-pro’s thumbs.
All of which means that Bay was more or less bred as the perfect director for
Transformers. The movie, for those that weren’t tuned in on Saturday mornings and weekdays after school during the Reagan years, is based on a popular cartoon and set of toys from the 1980s. Both featured two sects of robot aliens with the power to transform into a variety of impressive-looking vehicles who had come to Earth to battle it out. The evil Decepticons were led by the cruel Megatron, while the good guys, the Autobots, were led by the regal (and somewhat redundantly named) Optimus Prime, a red and blue semi-truck commandingly voiced by Peter Cullen, who reprises his role in the film.
