Movie Review: Transformers

The thing about Michael Bay's films is that he is not a great storyteller and he's also not sensitive enough to create some interesting characters. Leave that to Tarantino and others. He likes to blow things up. If you look at his record he's been successful in films where the lead characters are seasoned actors and/or there's lot of blowing up to do - for example, Armageddon, Bad Boys (1 and 2) and now Transformers. So I walked into the movie expecting pretty much the same thing and yes you guessed it, the movie has really awesome action and some pretty mediocre, clichéd characters.

One way to look at Transformers is to say who cares about tiny humans, when you have Optimus Prime and Megatron involved in a battle of global dominance, right? That works in the movie for the most part, except when Bay tries to devote more than necessary screen time to his human characters. This is probably the only negative point about the movie. The characters are not only mundane, but surprisingly they all speak in cliches, except for Shia Lebouf who delivers a strong charming performance as the lead. Shia has a great future ahead of him, he's also rumored to be in the next installment of Indiana Jones. Megan Fox, his love interest in the movie, didn't really had to say any lines in the film, for me I stopped listening after her slow mo leaning over to check the car's (Bumblebee) engine (I think male viewers will agree, see the picture below).  Everyone one else including Anthony Anderson, Tyrese Gibson, Jon Voight and Josh Duhamel play characters you've seen at least a million times. John Turturro's character was more weird than interesting, but it was at least different from rest of the cookie cutter cast.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can now talk about all the digital coolness this movie is packed with and the real reason why you should watch Transformers. First of all the scenes where they transform from cars and other things into robots (or Trannies as Stephen Colbert calls them) and back are just worth the price of admission. Coming to blowing things up part; we all know Michael Bay is great at that and he gets multiple opportunities to showcase his talent. The CG action in the movie does not look synthetic at all. Some of those scenes are so grand that you might suffer from severe eye fatigue if you are sitting in any of the front four rows. It's hard to describe these scenes in words and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed. Although I would say that the duel between Megatron and Optimus Prime could have been more badass, it was actually a bit one-sided. For those of you who like to read the entire synopsis before watching the movie, you can go here and read it.

I am sure the movie will go down as one of the most entertaining sci-fi action flicks of our times and will have a huge fan following in addition to the hard core Transformers fans. For someone like me, who didn't grow up watching Transformers, it was a great time at the movies for two weekends in a row (last weekend was Die Hard). The other take away from this movie is, if you hear that Michael Bay is directing anything other than I'ma-blow-this-building-car-and-whatever-else-in-the-way movie, run as far away from it as you can.