Robots in Disguise, or was it the plot?
Let me praise the screenwriters for starting this movie out on the right foot. I think it had so much potential from the beginning. I felt like starting it out right would lead to everything else falling into place. Hearing Peter Cullen’s voice narrating the beginning, was priceless. Immediately I attached myself to the film and convinced myself that nothing could go wrong from this point on. If they had started it out right, it can’t be wrong.
I was wrong.
Aside from this, the movie became a very strung out, messy plot that contains a half-hearted love story, a disjointed government cover-up and a messy series of fights that make you wonder how the destruction of public-property all over the place wouldn’t warrant some type of ‘All robots being launched back into space’ conflict. Everything was a bit disjointed.
First, let’s talk about Shia LaBeouf and his love story. He plays a wacky teen who isn’t accepted by anyone. Pushing to get a car, he finally finds one that suits him well, a beat-up yellow Camaro, and he goes cruising to up his status. He meets and finds a sassy girl, played by Megan Fox, who wants to reject him, but feels like an object with her current boyfriend. Taking a ride with him, she gets tangled in his web of mess that’s about to come up. Somehow, through thick and thin, she ends up falling in love with him. In between these spots there is a load of surprise, from finding out that his yellow car is a robot, to nearly being trampled multiple times by gigantic robots. Somewhere the love works, it’s like Titanic, but without the real strong story or actual love connection.
Second, the government conspiracy to hide information regarding knowing of the robots, is horrible. John Turturro, who is just an enormously talented actor, plays the squad leader for a group called ‘Section 7’. A government department that isn’t on the grid of the government that the president himself doesn’t even know about. While that part isn’t far fetched, the fact that they fit into the story is just absurd. They are obviously placed there to act as an explanatory filler for any questions that may not have been completely explained in the original plot. It’s basically an ‘out’ for screenwriters and directors. If you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, they have a good explanation of this in there. When Brian falls from a tower a UFO swoops down and picks him up, takes him up to space, then is in an intergalactic war, gets shot down, crashes back to earth in the exact spot Brian was falling to and Brian gets out of the UFO unharmed. The UFO was a device that saved his life so that he wouldn’t die falling from the Roman tower. Section 7 is that UFO-esque device trying to save a very shaky plot.
Finally, the autobots and decepticons… they were done well. I think the shear mass of the robots and their destructive natures and capabilities was done well. I didn’t like how you couldn’t tell one from another, but that’s the breaks. To bring realism into the picture you had to give up familiarity. Had this movie solely been robots creating havoc and resolutions, then this would have been the perfect movie. The action sequences between these things were unbelievably done. I give kudos to Michael Bay for his hard work on getting this awesome fight sequences together. What I wish was that he spent just a little bit more time keeping the movie closer to the original story. One single cube doesn’t determine if one side controls the other. It should have been total destruction with the autobots prevailing after kicking the decepticons back to the stone age. So many should-have-could-haves here.
On a side note, I take kudos away from Michael Bay for so many darn product placements. Let’s see… GMC, Panasonic, Ebay and Chevy were the main ones. And it’s alright to make money off of product placement, just don’t blatantly make it obvious that the products are there and turn it into some commercial filled film. We get enough of that crap at the beginning of theatrical releases nowadays. Here’s case/point with what I mean by this. The blonde beautiful aussie is trying to steal the SD card from the government computer she’s working on (where she’s deciphering the sound) and she pulls the card out, moves it slightly left and right so that you can see the logo of Panasonic clearly in the shot and then slyly puts it away whilst looking around suspiciously to see who saw her. If you’re going to steal something that could get you put away for life, why would you spend the extra 3-5 seconds showing off the card? Just terrible stuff.
Special Features that are truly good
You get a nice variety of features with this DVD, which may make it worth the price. You get the making of featurettes, you have plenty of DVD-Rom material and you even have around four easter eggs. I think that the features, which include a nice concept slideshow, are pretty darn nice. I can’t say that enough. How Bay and his crew brought these robots to life, even Bay addressing how he knew that fans were unhappy about what was happening, these features are worth a view.
What makes these features especially nice, and this is the way you should treat your features if you’re making a DVD (message to studios), is by making each feature lengthy and interesting. One of the features goes through the entire process of how Bay came to the idea of making this movie, who he collaborated with and how the actual robots were made. It’s really interesting how these was done and kudos back to Michael Bay and Paramount.
Honestly, you won’t be disappointed with what the two-disc edition brings, it actually helps the movie and it makes Bay more likeable in my view.
Final Thoughts
I simply didn’t like this film. If the love story had been left out, the secret government sector had been left out and all that wasted time concentrated on the robots alone, this would have been the best Bay film to date. Because of those two things and the holes in the story, it just seemed a bit disjointed and confusing at times. Again, the product placements bothered me, but not as much as the story.
For what it’s worth, this could be a great film for the kids and the adults could enjoy the special features, reliving their childhood again.
Maybe Transformers 2 will be better, but this one certainly lacked.