Transformers - Page 1

Look, another non-comic book movie! The cynical might say that it's a cheap attention grab to bank on the recent DVD release of a mega-popular movie. The more fair-minded might say there's no reason the site operator should limit himself to comic movies, despite past statements, and that there have been lots of comics based on the property. The cynics would be right. On another note, despite my overuse of Terminator references, this movie really IS frighteningly close to Terminator 3, without QUITE being a ripoff. You have the a MacGuffin virus inserted into the world's computer systems, for no real reason, the main character guarded by a machine protector who gets overplayed for cheap laughs, a gratuitous romance, a blond-girl running amok in a secret-military-industrial headquarters that's under assault by incredibly powerful machines that want to exterminate humanity, machines disguising themselves to better infiltrate society, and a disturbing lack of plot or compelling characterization. Add in Ah-nold and Kristanna Loken in form-fitting leather, and in a general sense it's pretty much the same movie minus the interesting ending. I.E. A big loud action piece that recycles plot-elements we've seen thousands of time before because Hollywood is completely out of ideas.

As I write this, I'm using a free 21-inch monitor I scored off somone. It's a little flaky, and the phosphers are about burned out, giving a dim picture even after cranking the brightness and contrast up, but it is a massive improvement over my old 15-incher at 1024x768. We start out with a black screen, hearing Peter Cullen say that before time began, there was the Cube. And after that, there was Hypercube, which wasn't as good. We get pretty CGI of space rocks as Cullen says that they know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create world and fill them with life. Hey, I can do that! Just throw around some breadcrumbs and a planet will be overrun by hungry ants in no time. Cullen says “This is how our race was born.” He says for a time, they lived in harmony, but like all great power, some wanted it for good, others for evil, and so began the war that ravaged their planet until it was consumed by death, and the Cube was lost to the far reaches of space. Wow, this is a talky movie. I thought Michael Bay was more about jibber-jabber and things exploding. We see a giant version of the Lament Configuration float through space. Cullen informs us that they scattered across the galaxy, hoping to find it and rebuild their home, searching every star, every world. So... it's so bloody important that they fought a war over it, somehow lost it, then decided maybe it was a bad idea to launch it into the void of space? He says that just all hope seemed lost, message of a new discovery drew them to an unknown planet called Earth. We see the Hellraiser box burn in the atmosphere as we get the “Transformers” title. He mopes that they were already too late.

Middle East, in Ir- I mean, Qatar in some dinky airplane flying over the desert. Soldiers are casually rambling about what they're going to do on shore-leave. I say shore-leave since stop-loss keeps the poor bastards in the military even after their tour of duty is over. Some guy who looks like a stand in for Reese (making his unit name Reeses' Pieces) from the Terminator/Aliens reminds some guys who's been jabbering in Spanish that no one else in the unit speaks Spanish. El Spaniard is a bit pissy. Dammit, HE moved to America, and it's reasonable to expect all you white boys to speak his language! Reese, deciding it's not worth it, just blows it off. Some nerdy guy asks if they remember weekends? Not really, Raoul got shrapnel through the back of his head and can't reme- what were we talking about?. Reese gets asked if he's ever had a perfect day, but he non-answers by saying he just can't wait to hold his baby girl for the first time. I hope for your sake your wife didn't also give you a necklace for luck, or that cliché seals your doom. Guys make “aw” noises while Reese grouses at them to shut up.

Army base. Vertibirds from Fallout 2 land, but the soldiers aren't cool enough to wear advanced power armor yet, much less the fabled Mark II they only keep in a single chest on an oil rig with the President. We see some generic life on the base stuff. Reese, sitting in the middle of combat gear, gets distracted from making notes by a little Ira- I mean, Qatari kid. Reese asks how he's doing. “Water.” Um, yeah, I don't think the little guy speaks English. Kid offers him a bag of explosives, tricking the evil imperialistic American and killing him for the glory of Allah. Actually, it really IS water. But he peed in it first. Reese thanks him and asks him if he's going to help him with the gear. This little conquered slave pretends to be happy as he uses the opportunity to spy on the base for Al-Queda.

We switch to a military chopper flying alone through the desert. In the communications center at the base, a Guy tells “Colonel Sharp” they have an inbound unidentified infiltrator. Sharp looks at the ridiculously pretty screen graphic on Guy's computer screen. Sharp gets on the radio, telling the unidentified aircraft that it is in restricted US military airspace. Not Ir- Quatri! No sirree! He orders it to squawk ident and head east out of the area. Sharp blah blahs some military jargon, telling Raptors one and two to intercept. The military finally has their dream of tame, enslaved clone-dinosaurs to use as mounts for shock troop. “Bogie is in the weeds ten miles out, not squawking.” We get a shot of jets taking off, tipping us off this is movie is really about Michael Bay having a great big stiffy for the military. I have nothing against the military, but... I came to watch giant alien robots pound the shit out of each other, and the love for the military took over the movie (and hackers that had nothing to do with the plot). Sharp gets on the horn again, telling the helicopter that they're escorting it to SOCCENT airbase, and if it doesn't comply they'll use deadly force. If it complies, they'll still use force, but the pilots will fire the giant nerf guns instead of the giant explosive missiles. Bays visually drools on the jets and helicopter as a jet pilot says “Tail 4500 X-ray.” Guy pulls out a piece of paper, telling Sharp that it says here 4500 X was shot down three months ago. Sharp grabs the paper, spitting “Afghanistan!” Sure you don't mean a made-up name to avoid politics in this movie, like Panmatigar? Sharp tells Guy to check and recheck. Guy says he did. A friend of his was on that chopper. There's only one possibility then... it's a ghost! Or they faked their deaths and went AWOL from their government masters and have been living it up on moonshine and goats milk. Guy orders the “unidentified aircraft” that they'll escort it to US SOCCENT base. At the airtower, Sharp asks the radar where's the inbound? “Bogie's five miles out sir.”

Some... room. Reese comes in, asking some guy at a laptop if his wife's on. He yes sirs him and leaves, since she wasn't NEARLY as hot as that crazy blond stripper, even if she charges less. Reese goes up to watch the show. We see her on video as they teleconference and they go “goo-goo-poo-poo” insane over the baby she's holding. Reese spazzes to look at those cheeks, he just wants to chew on them. ... That... sounds like he literally wants to eat his baby in a cannibalistic fashion. Reese brags that they made a good looking kid, unaware about the real reasons the pool man was over so often. Wife brags that she has his laugh. He spazzes about her laughing, asking that she laughed?! Yeah, she read the script. He asks if she's sure she didn't just fart. Wife laughs that she's a lady! Women are incapable of gastric emissions! She says she doesn't know him yet, but she will! Baby, not liking the strange man who's calling her a farter, and wishing the nice man who smelled like chlorine would come back, starts to cry.

As night falls and the chopper passes, Sharp looks through some binoculars. “4500 X. Something's not right.” I mean, you can't even SEE through this ghost ship! Why, there's not even any chains or whoooooooooo-whooooooooo-ing from the ghost pilot! As the chooper lands, gun-car-things approach. In the comm room, Guy spazzes that the radar's jammed. Is it raspberry? Only one man would dare give them the raspberry... Lonestar! He gets on the phone, muttering it's coming from the chopper. He gets distracted as the lights cut for a sec. Hey, even the military needs to pay the power bill.

Non-peep show. The call starts going like the rest of the electrical stuff. Calling Wife “Sarah”, he tells her that if she can hear him, he loves her and he'll be home soon. The call cuts off, since the pool man's here for her daily “pool cleaning.” Reese puts his head down in frustration, since they hadn't gotten to the stripping part of their tele-conference yet.

Airfield. Soldiers do soldierly things as they whip their guns out and get into position around the chopper. The pilot, with a rather 70's porn mustache, doesn't seem to care. Sharp says “MH-53 pilot, power down now.” The pilot's face flickers into a machine form. Sharp tells him to have his crew step out or they will kill him. Yeah... except he was minding his own damn business until you bothered him, sparky. He's not a threat. Pilot decides to comply by powering down the helicoptor blades. Pilot does NOT comply by turning the helicopter into a pissed off, giant killer robot, who is NOT happy about being yelled at by jarheads for the last hour. The soldiers initially hold there fire, but decide that instead of standing there, waiting to die, they should unload on him as he transforms. Sharp's awed. “My god!

While Blackout (we don't find out the robot's names until the last 25 minutes of the movie, but that's who he is) goes on a rampage, Reese whigs from the distant explosives. A Token Black Guy, who is 87% more likely to die than a white guy in a major Hollywood summer blockbuster, busts ass, yelling that they bombed the antenna farm and they're under attack. Blackout BLOWS THE SHIT out of the base.

Comm room. Blackout rips the roof off and grabs a big supercomputer looking thing in his fist. Sharp orders everyone to go, but stays himself, seeing 1.2 billion images flash on the computer screen, since that's how Hollywood thinks sophisticated computer downloading works. BITTORRENT doesn't look that pretty. Sharp sits down, bellowing that it's trying to access the files and to cut the hard line. Guy, at a big lever next to the power boxes, bellows that he needs a key, it's locked! Sharp grabs an ax. If they can't cut the hardline, he'll go all Beowulf and decapitate that monster's head! Realizing that would be stupid, as he lacks a poet to properly sing his praises, he instead pushes Guy out of the way and ax-murders the power box.

Outside, more blowing up as Reese runs like a pansy. The thing is, it's TOO chaotic here. As Token runs to Reese and Kid, hiding next to a broken tank, he collapses on the ground as Blackout stands over him. Token decides that the big monster that's about to step on him isn't close-enough for a good look, so he whips out some binoculars. We get first person view from the binoculars and Blackout. Blackout, thinking it's rude to use binoculars, morphs a gun out of his chest. Token spazzes. “What the-?” and runs. El Spaniard shoots Blackout's chest gun with a grenade launcher or something, damaging it. Token makes it to his pals. Guys, I'm still in the movie! Blackout, having better thinks to do than chase the black man who's marked for death, vomits a mechanical scorpion off his chest, which buries itself under the ground. Blackout finishes nuking everything.

High school. Shia “the beef” Lebeaf is in class. He's a dork in this movie, but his bored professor who's out of a 1950's movie FAR out-nerds him. Teacher tells “Mr. Witwicky” (aka Spike- um, that's the cartoon. It's Sam here) to go. Sam nervously dumps stuff on a desk in front of the class, while he apologizes, saying he's got a lot of stuff. We get a close-up of the smiling love-interest for the movie and her cliché jock boyfriend. Jock tells her to watch. Sam starts to speak, then gets nailed by a rubber band from Jock. Teacher makes a half-assed effort to demand to know who did that. “People! Responsibility.” Then he sits back down, since he's just waiting for class to end so he can go home and look for a more respectable, higher paying job, like the guys who collect urinal cakes in men's bathrooms. Sam nervously says that for his family genealogy report, he decided to do it on his great-great-grandfather, a famous man named Captain Archibald Witwicky. Why, he's so famous, I've never heard of him! He expounds that he was a very famous explorer, and was one of the first to explore the Arctic Circle, which is a big deal. He, however, failed to find Santa's Workshop or the Fortress of Solitude, so who cares?

Sam flashes a map to the camera as we get a flashback of a bunch of explorers with a ship jammed into some ice. He says in 1897 (Archibald) took 41 brave sailors straight into the Arctic Shelf. With the amount of chunks of ice there, it's less brave and more suicidal. Most them signed up the same way; he met them in the bar, gave them a nice, strong pint of rum, and the next morning they woke up on the ship dressed in a ship's uniform, 30 miles off-coast, informed they were conscripted. We close-up on Archie and the Gang as Archie, an old man in glasses, bellows “Move faster, men! Move! Chop! Heave!” Being old and blind, he still isn't aware that they've been moving, chopping, and heaving for the last two hours. Then again, he writes letters to his wife who died five years ago and never notices when he forgets to put his pants on in the morning. Someone bellows that the ice is freezing faster than it's melting, and tells them to chop faster! “Heave, men!” Come on, they've beeen doing that for days, everytime you remind them that dear old Nick is no longer with them. You'd almost think they thought there was something morally wrong about eating their dead when they ran out of food yesterday! Archie gets back into the yelling himself. “Heave! No sacrifice, no victory!” Not noticing the extreme cold or sea of ice around them, or the glacier they rammed, he assures them that they'll get to the Arctic Circle!

School. Sam says so that's the story, right? I guess so, I mean, it's YOUR boring family history, dude. He starts showing off some of the old nautical crap he dumped on the desk, telling them that here they have some basic instruments and tools used by 19^th century semen. The whole class giggles. This, sadly, is par for course for all of the humor in the movie. There is ONE bit I like, but that's towards the end. An annoyed teacher flashes a “stop sign” with the word “quiet” on it. The audience is going to wish they had that sign a lot for most of the dialog in this movie. Sam then goes into auctioneer mode. “This here is a quadrant which you can get for 80 bucks.” He shiftily looks at the teacher, telling them that it's for sale by the way. He grabs something else, saying it's a sextant, and for $50 it's a bargain. Surprisingly, a bidding war doesn't erupt over the sex-tant starved teenagers. Teacher preemptively flashes his quiet sign while the love interest (Mikaela) grins. Sam holds up some cracked glasses, saying they're pretty cool. I mean, there are specks of blood Archie never cleaned off when he got in a fight with that hooker in Jamaica who gave him a little something extra, and they have glass thicker than the lenses on the Hubble Telescope, but otherwise, they're awesome! They're his grandfather's glasses. He says he hasn't quite gotten them appraised yet, but they've seen many cool things. Let me be clear here, I don't hate Sam, like I hated Sam Raimi's Peter Parker, he's just the type of guy who's a bit of a spazz and you feel sorry for, and you can even tolerate speaking to, if you have no choice, but you'd never, ever invite him to the lunch table.

Teacher, sick of his classroom being turned into an auction house, though he may use that idea in the future to subsidize his $14,000 a year salary, asks in a bored voice if Sam's going to try selling his liver too? Oh, he sold that on eBay yesterday. He does have some teeth he pulled out of Archie's skull with a pair of pliers! They make a great bead-necklace for that special someone! He informs “Mr. Witwicky” that this isn't show and sell, it's the 11^th grade. Even though he obviously doesn't care, he tells Sam that his grandfather wouldn't be very proud of what he's doing. Hey, consider it payback for him knocking up his great-great grandmother and abandoning her at the alter. Sam apologizes, telling the class that, you know, this is all going towards his car fund. “You can tell your folks. It's on eBay. I take PayPal.” He begs that he takes cold, hard cash too. He stops short of begging for trade items like amber and bear furs. Teacher throws his head back in frustration. Sam says that the compass makes a great gift for Columbus Day. Somewhere, Hallmark Executives busily scribble this down as a great way to encourage people to buy more stuff. Teacher bellows at Sam. We get a gratuitous close-up of Jock and Mikaela while Sam says unfortunately Archie, the genius that he was, wound up going blind and crazy in a psycho ward. Which is why you never EVER drink your own recruitment rum. Then again, he had about a 40% survival rate for people who drank the stuff. The rest got their corpses stripped and chucked over the side, or used in the tasty stew recipe they discovered in the Arctic Circle. Sam shows a yellowed newspaper, pointing out some strange symbols he said he drew, and babbling on about some giant Ice Man that he thought he'd discovered. As we'll find out later, he's a pilot, but he isn't going to ask you to be his wingman anytime, he's more likely to tear your arms off and drink your blood.

To end us from Sam ensuring he won't make any more friends at this school, ever, the class rings. As everyone takes off, Teacher flip-flops, saying there might be a pop quiz tomorrow. There might not. He's not sure; he's started keeping all of his class papers in a quantum box that his cat likes to sleep in. It might exist, and it might not, until the wave-form collapses and it winds up popping into existence soaked in cat urine. Teacher rambles for everyone to sleep in fear at night, while Sam desperately tries to hock the glasses on passing classmates. “Here, you want? Here, 50. 40? 30?” Before Sam can humiliate himself even more than when he tried to fight that 50-year old alcoholic bum for the best panhandling spot next to I-85, Teacher calls attention to Sam from his desperate attempt to sell out his family heirlooms for a buck fifty. Sam asks how he did. Teacher thinks and says “I'd saaaay... a solid B.” Sam's not happy. Teacher explains in annoyance that he was hocking his great grandfather's crap in his classroom. I mean, if he had had sold SOMETHING, it would have been an A. Or at least $20 bucks in his pocket to afford cheap booze from a hookup like one of the 21-years old cops masquerading as high school students. Increasing his aroma of desperate nerd by 40%, Sam starts babbling and begging, directing him to a middle-aged fat guy sitting in a convertible outside the window. Sam weasels that he wants to tell him about a dream! A boy's dream! And a man's promise to that boy! Uh, yeah, if you're having issues with subconsciously being interested in men, the counselor's down the hall. He says his father looked him in the eye and said “Son, I'm gonna buy you a car, but I want you to bring me $2,000 and three A's.” He also told him, quite loudly, that once he has the car, he has to move out forever and never ever talk to him or his wife again. He spazzs that he got the $2,000 and two A's. So... why are you still selling crap for your car fund then? “Okay? Here's the dream. Your B-. Dream gone. Kaput.” Teacher looks bored and doesn't care, not even having enough life left in his barren soul to offer false hope to Sam and torment him for his own amusement. Sam then asks him to ask himself. What would Jesus do? Turn a nearby river into wine and throwing a county-wide kegger? Scream and beg for the Romans to not nail him to a piece of wood again? Host his own talk-show, and have Martha Stewert do a baking segment on communion wafers that turn into human flesh after being swallowed?

Convertible. An ecstatic Sam runs up and jumps in. Apparently the Teacher's answer was “Give you an A” instead of “get the hell out of here.” He hopes Sam will get in a drunk driving accident and be in the hospital the rest of the school year instead of in his classroom. I don't even know the name of the dad character, who was Sparkplug in the cartoon, an oil driller. Here he's an overweight, middle aged guy who seems to be in the upper-middle class, going by his car. Seeing as how one of Bay's past films was about oil-miners in space, you'd figure he'd want to continue that theme. Dad, bored, doesn't quite believe him. Sam says it's an A-, but it's an A! Um, an A is an A. Instead of being picky (and he's a cheap bastard, as we'll see) he surprisingly goes with it. After driving down the street, he announces that he has a surprise for Sam. They filled out some emancipation papers on his behalf, so he can live on his own now! What do mean “no”? You'll love it! Not get outta my house. Sam spazzes out as the pull into a Porsche dealership, saying he has to be kidding him! Dad says he is. “You're not getting a Porsche.” True, they're casing the place and going to come back at night and steal one. Grand theft auto, baby! An unhappy Sam asks if he thinks that's funny. Yup! He asks his sullen kid if he really thought he'd get him a Porsche for his first car? Well, he did think you at least wouldn't spring for a complete piece of crap, which we'll soon find was mistaken. As they pull into some cheapo car dealership with a guy dressed as a clown in front, an aging yellow Camaro follows them in. Dad laughs that it was just a practical joke, and Sam retorts that it's not a funny joke. Something this movie is intimately familiar with.