Transformers (2007)

This is it, everyone. The moment you've been begging me for and here I am, giving you all what you desire most. Today we're talking about Michael Bay's Transformers finally. Let's break down a bit of history for the younglings, shall we? Because not everyone that reads these was born at a time when Transformers was more than a CGI trainwreck. it's shocking, I know, but there was a time when the Transformers existed in a different form, had character development, and there weren't sexual euphemisms littered throughout in a sad attempt at humour that even myself at the age of 12 would've rolled my eyes at.

There was also a time when Megatron's face didn't look like an explosion of jagged metal scraping together.

During the 1980s (i.e. my formative years) the Transformers was a juggernaut. The toys, the show, the comics, it was all out there and you couldn't escape it. It was an easy enough concept to grasp: sentient alien robots who could change into vehicles and other things to blend into our world while they battled it out. It wasn't the most complex show, but it definitely had its moments. There were defined personalities, characters who experienced growth, and there was even death. Yes, there was death in a children's cartoon back then. The powers that be didn't really think it would be a big deal, as they were killing off robots so it wasn't "real" death in their eyes. Except these people didn't follow the stories, the characters, or understand anything beyond that outset. Yes, these were robots. But they were also alive and had lives and desires. When you kill them, it leaves an impact on the young fans. And boy, did they feel it. The backlash over the deaths in the original animated film were so severe that the plot of the G.I. Joe aniamted film was changed so one of the major characters didn't die.

I guess ol' Duke was a robot too, right?

Bearing all this in mind, the fans were beyond excited to see a live-action adaptation of the series. It was like all our inner children were leaping for joy inside of us because we were finally going to get to see these characters we loved again, but in the real world this time. We were so happy that we ignored all the warning signs and trotted into those theaters, eager to see what was sure to be the greatest geekgasm of a film to ever grace the screen. I'll say this...it definitely had a very transformative effect on me. So, without further wasting time, let's dive into this dungheap and hope that I don't suffocate along the way.

If I die, just bury me next to Bumblebee's ability to speak. Apparently having a voice is severely uncool.

The movie starts off with some cool audio effects (which will be overused to point where they become blisteringly annoying) and then Optimus Prime gives us the low-down on what happened on Cybertron. You see, there's this thing called the Cube and apparently it's where the entire Cybertronian race was born. Quintessons and Primus? Man, fuck that noise! It's all about the Cube!

The Cube knows all...the Cube sees all...

The obvious stuff is told to us through this opening exposition. The Autobots are good, the Decepticons are bad, there's this power they're all searching for the obvious reasons (saving everything or ruling everything) and they went to war over it. Megatron ends up chasing this power to Earth, where he crashed and ended up being frozen in ice in the Arctic Circle until Archibald Witwicky accidentally found him and activated his flight computer. This left him a crazy man and led to a secret shadow organization being formed to handle stuff with giant alien robots called Sector 7.

A secret shadowy government organization that handles alien stuff? What an original idea!

In modern day times, the other Decepticons decide its time to find their leader (who's only been missing for a few hundred thousand years or so) and end up hacking into the military computers. Also they blow shit up. Did I mention this was a Michael Bay film? Yes, there are a lot of explosions in this movie. I like to imagine that every scene with an explosion in it is Michael Bay jizzing into the audience's collective faces as they jerk him off by paying to see what he has made.

"HNNNNNGGGGGGGHH!!!"

Moving on from that lovely thought, we get to meet the only important human character in these films, Sam Witwicky. He's descendant of ol' Archie and is just a bang-up kind of guy...who is trying to sell priceless heirlooms on eBay for money. Yay, our greedy asshole hero who only cares about getting a car and scoring with a hot girl. Woo. Again, this is a Michael Bay film, these are the tools he has to work with. Dipshit's dad takes him to go buy a car and a car literally picks him, because otherwise we won't have this wonderful character in our film about giant robots. The car is actually Bumblebee and he seems to like Sam...for some reason. Bumblebee tries to help Dipshit get the attention of the movie's "hot girl" character, who is less a character and more of an idea of what hot girls are supposed to be as seen through the director's eyes. She's "played" by Megan Fox.

Yes, ol' Toe Thumbs is here to torture me again with her acting "talent", which is about as all encompassing as her shirt.

If you didn't learn from my last review of a movie with her in it, Megan Fox can't fucking act. She just can't. Groot is less wooden that her and he's a fucking sentient tree. She's in this movie to look hot and be desirable. Do I find her to be either of those things? Not really, but I'm a bit weird when it comes to attraction. I need to bond with someone before I can really feel a desire for them one way or another. This can theoretically be possible, as actors can create a bond to the audience through their character. Not Megan Fox though. She's a board with a midriff and hoop earrings. She's fucking Plank from Ed, Edd, and Eddy without all of the personality.

That's right, I said it. I'll probably say it again every single time I am forced to endure a movie with her in it too.

We see some stuff with the government trying to figure out what's all going on, employing many computer experts to figure out what is happening with the giant helicopter robot attacking their base and hacking their network, while some soldiers from that base are wandering the desert looking for a way to call home after surviving said large robot attack. Sam's parents also are here too, because we need schtick, apparently. But all that is incidental because Bumblebee really wants to get Sam laid. Like to a creepy obsessed level. Maybe he likes to watch? Wait, Sam doesn't know Bumblebee is a robot yet...oh shit, he wants them to have sex inside of him. That's really gross.

Bumblebee, you creepy fuck.

But yeah, the cat gets out of the bag later when Bumblebee sneaks off and Sam follows him, thinking that someone stole his car. He's pretty shocked to learn that his car stole itself. Oh, and the wooden wonder is there too. Bumblebee was signalling the other Autobots, who soon land on Earth in the least stealthy fashion ever (because the Autobots totally couldn't have flown a spaceship or anything). They meet, Optimus gives the dipshit duo the schpiel, Megan Fox hurts Bumblebee's feelings (which results in him turning into a newer car that totally isn't here to sell that same car), and the Decepticon named Frenzy (who is just a head at this point due to an earlier scene) turns into her phone. Yeah, I'm skipping over some stuff and telling some things slightly out of order, but really, does it matter? It's mostly stupid jokes that fall flat and unimportant bullshit.

Like the bit with the hip young cop saying Sam is on drugs, because that's really funny. Comedy gold.

Also there's this blonde hacker lady and she learns something important to the plot with the military, but who cares because she's not Sam or Megan Fox, so let's get back to the stupid! Over in a totally different movie about soldiers fighting a giant robot scorpion monster, the surviving soldiers do exactly that as Scorponok shows up to be one of the many nameless cannon fodder Decepticons in this film who have no personalities beyond wanting to murder the shit out of humans. During all of this, Christopher Titus' TV brother dies, meaning that the only character I cared about is now gone.

In the aaarrrrrrmssss of an angeeeelll... R.I.P. Dave.

Blonde hacker lady shows her hacker friend, Anthony Anderson, some of the stuff she found for the military and they get arrested because of this. Sam and Megan Fox try to get Archie's glasses (which have a map of some sort on them) but Sam and his family also get arrested. They get arrested by Agent Seymour Butts (this movie is making me immature, I'm sorry) and all of them get taken to a secret place when alien stuff is researched and reverse engineered into technology we use. All that stuff that humans struggled to accomplish over the years in the tech world? Yeah, no one actually really came up with on their own. Nope, it was aliens.

I guess we know who really wrote this script.

While trying to save the dipshit duo, Bumblebee ends up also getting captured and Megan Fox's phone wakes up because it remembered it was an angry robot head. He calls the other Decepticons, because dammit, there has to be better villains in this movie than John Turturro, and Starscream drops by to act nothing like himself at all because the robots having names and identities are superfluous when we can have more explosions instead. Frenzy, the disembodied robot head, wakes Megatron up and it turns out the Cube was there all along.

No, sadly, not that Cube. That's in a much better film series.

Bumblebee transforms the Cube into a tiny Cube that Sam can carry, because he needs to actually serve some purpose in here, and they all run off to Mission City where Michael Bay can have all the explosive orgasms he could ever dream of. Now, there is a minor thing I failed to mention about the mysterious Cube. It can create Transformers. What this means is that during this mega-huge-fuck-me-in-the-ass battle, random machines turn into Transformers and just start attacking everything, because this movie is pure chaos and there's no reason to look for a valid reason behind anything beyond the fact it makes Michael Bay happy. So, most of the Decepticons get killed, because they never really mattered anyway, Jazz (the "black" Autobot) gets ripped in half by Megatron, and it all comes down to the leaders to decide the fate of everything.

Just kidding! Shia LeBeouf kills Megatron.

Yeah, Sam jams the Cube into Megatron's chest, which kills him, and Megan Fox did some stuff that I've already forgotten. Something about a tow-truck, I think. The day is saved, Starscream runs away, and the Autobots are now stuck on Earth with their stupid new human friends who either don't really have personalities or have really awful ones (I'm looking at you, Sam). Thus ends this terrible movie that totally bombed and didn't ever have any awful sequels that you people will surely want me to torture myself with in the future.

Nevermind that sound, it's just me loudly sobbing.

If I could properly turn my hate for this movie and the ensuing headaches it created for me into a weapon, I could probably wipe out our entire solar system. My weaponized hatred for this film series is just that potent. What can I say about this movie, really? It's a stupid, vapid, juvenile attempt to turn a property aimed at children into something that the easily entertained with adore because it is full of flashy CGI and explosions. It's worse than Godzilla '98, Independence Day, and 2012 all at once, because at least those movies attempted to have something beyond the obvious disaster porn. Sure, those movies were bad, but this movie and its sequels are so much worse. These movies are there to hook you in, promising you that you'll see something cool and awesome, and then they just beat you over the head with shitty jokes and Megan Fox until you can barely remember if you like anything.

I suppose, in that way, it'd be a great way for use in brainwashing people. Because they're now stupid, you see?

Now, I have an admission to make: I actually really enjoyed this movie the first time I saw it in theaters. Yes, I could see the problems it had, but I was willing to look past them because I was finally getting what my inner child wanted: real Transformers on the big screen. That right there is the problem though, as people didn't think about whether it was good or not. No, all most of us thought about was that this was what that little kid inside of us wanted. The same little kid who ate boogers, shat their pants, picked on the person they liked as a form of flirting, and often found bathing to be a terrible atrocity. What I am saying is that our inner child is an idiot and we really need to be careful when deciding to let it take control of us. Because now this movie has sequels and Michael Bay seems to think that ticket sales equal a quality product. But, so does Hollywood, so that's just par for the course. But, worst of all is the fact that this movie gave Megan Fox a career.

Which is definitely the worst sin of all.

But there it is, you all got what you wanted. I reviewed this horrible movie. I'll likely end up covering the other ones too, because I've already opened the can of worms, so it's far too late to close it before they all wriggle their slimy way out. To say I hate this movie is an understatement, but it still isn't the worst movie I've seen. Fuck knows I have seen far worse and will likely see many more that truly are scraping the bottom of what was once a barrel full of fecal matter. That doesn't make this movie good though, it just means it sucks slightly less than some other things. It's still nestled deeply in that barrel, sticking up the place every single time Michael Bay decides to pull a fistful of it out to throw at us moviegoers. Maybe one day people will learn to stop letting him hit them. So, until Disney buys Hasbro and we get a reboot made by Pixar, I'll be here sobbing quietly because I know that may never actually happen. Later days, bleeders.

Oh yeah, Josh Duhamel was in this movie. He wasn't actually important. Shame, I liked Battle Creek.