In 1986, a generation of children screamed a scream of denial, rage, and mourning as the clueless idiots at Marvel’s animation arm pointlessly and Troy Denning-like killed Optimus Prime so that Hasbro could market a new round of Transformers toys.
In Transformers: The Movie, Optimus Prime returns to the Autobots’ base on Earth to find it overrun with Decepticons, and his own forces dead or hopelessly outnumbered and soon to fall.
Because he’s Optimus Prime, he sets out to singlehandedly turn the tide of battle and to kick ass. Because he’s Optimus Prime, he succeeds. Because Marvel’s animation arm was run by people hopped up on cocaine and stupid, he is inexplicably and gratuitously killed as the incongruous protagonist of the film for no appreciable reason gets in the way of Prime’s moment of triumph.
The extent of the absurdity of the move is obvious in retrospect: the animation of the film had begun without any input on fan interest in the show or toys, leaving the writers unaware that they were killing the most popular character in children’s TV; the man who voiced Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, later remarked that the geniuses at Sunbow had never told him that he had rooms filled to the brim with fan mail, waiting and never opened, addressed to his character.
The daytime cartoon experienced an immediate ratings crash, prompting not one but two hastily-animated and -written returns of Optimus Prime from the dead. In time, those same children who had cried an inchoate cry of denial pretended to grow up, and had children of their own.
And Hasbro decided to let Michael Bay make a movie about their childhood love.
It is fun and easy to make fun of Bay, who doubtless weeps bitter tears as he jet-skis on Lake Franzibald on his personal watercraft made from the souls of movie critics. At some point between Bad Boys and the making of this film, he became an unstoppable and uneditable juggernaut of money, and so his films now tend to be on the wrong side of credible in so many ways.
But instead of picking on his numerous failings as a filmmaker here, let’s give him credit where he deserves, and choose only two profound errors that fundamentally undermine this film.
Bay deserves credit for using Cullen as Prime. In retrospect, this is a no-brainer; at the time Cullen was announced, a roar of rapturous joy went up from those same overgrown children, precisely because no one had thought this a no-brainer in over a decade. While Bay may have thought he was doing this as some sort of homage, or perhaps for some sense of artistic completion, we all know what was happening in the back of his brain: He was thinking, How can I make money on this? The answer was Draw overgrown children into the theater by giving them Optimus Bleeping Prime, genius.
Film critics who will never run their own businesses or make money beyond dying newspaper wages sneer at making money, but this is one of those times we can all see the virtue of the profit motive: By trying to fill Lake Franzibald with cash, Michael Bay did the Lord’s work.
Bay also deserves credit for — yes, we’re serious — his cinematography. While explosions and panning camera angles and badly-filtered sunsets and rapidly swinging camera focus maybe don’t always work for tender moments of professions of love (an opinion the female half of this review couple rejects), they are basically perfect for a chaotic battle between giant alien robots using Earth as their battlefield.
Now, to the failings here.
Bay understands explosions. He understands metal on metal. He understands the inanimate in a way that very few directors, who are obsessed with emoting overgrown adolescents, do. This is a real gift and should not be underestimated. It was therefore a crime that he should make this movie not about giant, inanimate pieces of metal smashing into metal and causing huge explosions, but about humans and Shia LaBeouf. There is no need to dwell on the humans and LaBeouf in this review because no one who reads about this movie (or watches it) cares about them. Nevertheless, making the film about them, sometimes interjecting humans halfway through as if we should care about new humans when we really want to see Prime say, “One shall stand. One shall fall,” is an uncharacteristic waste of a man’s gift, and an insult to his customers.
On top of that, to take the giant pieces of metal and turn one of them into a jukebox with a complete understanding of human music but who lacks the ability to otherwise interact with the irrelevant humans may be one of the weirdest crimes against a cartoon franchise ever; it may have actually created the species of crime itself.
Simply, Bay took the robots with human personalities, shoved them to the side (making one into a walking mp3 player to boot), and then made the movie about humans with the personalities of mp3 players.
Second, and more crucially: This is a film that could have been a giant “We are so very very sorry” note to a generation. Indeed, the choice of Cullen as Prime was part of this healing process. So why not simply take the iconic scene, but correct it? This time, when Prime says, “OUT OF THE WAY, HOT ROD!” he can just shoot Hot Rod in the knee and then blow Megatron’s head off.
Then he “accidentally” blows Hot Rod’s head off. Trust us, this is the objectively good act here.
Prime then grabs his ship and flies to face Unicron, opens the Matrix of Leadership a little more, gets more awesome if that’s possible, and beats the living crap out of Unicron. A chaste but meaningful hug with Elita One later, Prime is firing off into the skies to the background strains of The Touch.
Transformers filled a Lake Franzibald with Benjamins. This version would have created the Franzibald Ocean.
Tired Parent Summary: You should watch this one with the DVD remote (mouse if you’re watching on Netflix) in hand, ready to fast forward to the parts with the interesting characters, past the humans and Shia LaBeouf. It’s an awesome, 30 minute movie.
Overall Rating: C
Rating of the Real, 30-Minute Movie: B
Buy Transformers at Amazon.com here.
Tired Parents, Late Reviews 