TRANSFORMERS (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Though I've never quit watching TV cartoons no matter how old I got, certain cartoons just never got on my radar, and the many iterations of TRANSFORMERS, as well as their imitators, are among them. And yet, looking at a list of the top ten highest-grossing films for 2007, the Michael Bay TRANSFORMERS kicks the ass of all others on the list (mostly sequels of one sort or another), except 300-- and I don't usually feel any great desire to rewatch 300. 

I'm not a huge fan of Bay, though I think his critical drubbings are unjustified and overdone. As for the writing-team on the first two TRANSFORMERS movies, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, their track record ranges from mediocre to the tone-deaf awfulness of the TREK films of the same era. Yet somehow these talents took a very simple kids' cartoon of the 1970s and gave it tons of Spielbergian brio. In fact, the 2007 TRANSFORMERS is a better Spielberg movie than most Spielberg films of the period.

Further, the actors playing the young leads-- Shia LeBeouf as Sam Witwicky and Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes-- turned in lively performances far more appealing than their usual "flavor of the month" offerings. Together they comprise the venerable trope "Nerdy guy impresses hot girl," but their cutesy romance works because it's kept peripheral to the central mystery: who are these shape-changing robot ETs and why are they are hiding on Earth in the forms of trucks and planes?

TRANSFORMERS also benefits from a canny juggling of patriotism (the movie came out six years after 9-11) and skepticism. An early scene depicts American airplanes forcing a mysterious helicopter to land on their military base-- only to have the 'copter transform into a mammoth Decepticon robot who trashes the military's best weapons like a pocket Godzilla. At the same time, only one data analyst, one Maggie, is able to figure out that the attacker isn't the spawn of Russia or China, while everyone else runs around without a clue. A super-secret military organization is shown to be responsible for salting away the Whatsit that both the noble Autobots and base Deccepticons seek, and I admired that late in the movie the script introduced a minor dick-villain for Sam and Mikaela to humiliate.     

Conversely, the script is ingenious in finding ways to make the Autobots likeable without over-explaining their goodness, as I think the cartoon did. The writers accomplished this by channeling Disney's LOVE BUG, having the Autobot Bumblebee morph into a car for Sam. Bumblebee does this to learn information from Sam that will lead the hero-robots to their goal. But the teen and the alien robot bond, partly through Bumblebee's inability to speak articulately, making him seem more like a faltering child than a spying ET. Later, Autobot leader Optimus Prime will provide all the needed exposition in the honeyed tones of Peter Cullen, but Bumblebee's more basic appeal sets the pace.

There are comedic bits that don't work, but they're fewer than the ones that do. Moreover, even though I was never a TRANSFORMERS fan, I appreciate that Bay and his team treated the adventure-theme straight, and one line from Sam to Mikaela speaks to the youthful need to trespass boundaries:

"Fifty years from now, don't you wanna be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?"