Transformers (2007) Movie Review

As seen on your favorite cinema

When I was a kid, I loved to play with action figures just like everybody. I don’t exactly remember how but I knew about these Transformers toys, back then they were every kid’s dream: cars that can change into bad-ass robots. Sadly, I never got one of those. I had a Spider Man and an Iron Man, but I felt good with them, imagination did the entire job and they became whatever I want them to be.

I didn’t have the opportunity to watch the TV show either, because I grew up in the 90s and the first generation of the show was more popular in the 80s. That’s why the first Transformers show I ever watched was a CG animated series called Beast Wars: Transformers, where this time, the characters transformed into biological beings, like Optimus Prime, this time called Optimus Primal who transformed into a gorilla and Megatron who transformed into a Tyrannosaurus, but again, I just could watch a few episodes and I don’t remember very well the plot.

Well, since these years, I totally forgot about the Transformers franchise… until I went to the cinema and I watched this.

HOT DAMN!!!

Wow. I was like “Oh my God, da hell did I watch?” As you obviously know, I’ve always been a fan of CG and 3D stuff. Suddenly, everybody was talking about Transformers again, the shows, the toys, their memories, it was crazy!  So, in the year 2007, the day finally came and I went to watch the film.

Well, as I said, I never watched the original TV show that started it all, so I think I can say that I watched the film from a neutral perspective without being affected by a nostalgia factor from it. Well, the movie was awesome. Is entertaining as all hell, this is how giants robots are supposed to fight a war, because that’s what the movie offers, is a war between these two factions, the Autobots and the Decepticons, who fight to get this ancient, mysterious object that they call the All Spark, a cube that irradiates a unique kind of energy that can give life to the machines.

Everything I knew about giant creatures fighting, at least in live action, was Power Rangers and a couple Godzilla films, so naturally, what I watched in Transformers was just how I always imagined a good fight between two giant beings. The action scenes are really well done and the animators did one hell of a job. Everything is over the top, from the designs, to the transformations, the battles; even the human characters were kind of weird.

Here comes the matrix!

And there’s where I think this movie goes down. Obviously we want to see the robots, but it would be impossible not to add a human plot, we need a human hero after all. Sam Witwicky, performed by Shia LaBeouf is our hero. I think is a little stereotypical, you know, he had to be the guy that nobody respects, the guy that is invisible to the girl that he wants to hang out, yeah, the typical stuff. That’s until his father helps him to buy a car that happened to be an alien. Yeah, that would change anybody’s life.

So, there’s a love story involved, which I think is nice, Megan Fox is hot as all hell and in my opinion does a good job, like everybody else in the film, even the weird characters. Because the weird, overacted characters are supposed to be like that, they add that kind of cartoonish element to the whole thing, but yes, they are still a bit annoying, specially Sam’s parents, God I hate them, specially his mom.

Overall, I think the movie did a good job and it was set in a good tone. Some of my friends complained about the film since the very first time the watched the trailer, because there where such things like the Pentagon and the US army, they were like “What da hell? That has absolutely nothing to do with the show!” But hey, give me a break, if you wanna see the show, go watch the show. They movie doesn’t try to be like the show, in fact, I think it was a very clever idea because this movie, actually what it does is to put giant alien robots in the real world. Think about it, if some day some mechanical aliens start falling from the sky, probably the Pentagon would like to get involved.

And the suspense is well done. Half the film the government still doesn’t know what has been hacking their systems, which is fun because the audience knows exactly what is doing it, and we want to see the robots, but we have to wait for it. For example, Megatron is frozen the whole film until the climactic battle at the end which I thought it was good because it only made it more exciting when he finally get conscious and starts blowing the everlasting fuck out of everything.

Well, in conclusion, the movie was pretty good but it has its flaws. The Autobots were well developed as characters, all with different personalities, but we didn’t get anything like that from the Decepticons, except from Megatron. But the rest just appear, fight and die. In fact, Megatron has one hell of a battle with Optimus, although it was kind of short; he dies pretty quickly and that’s another thing I think everybody complained about, the Decepticons were kind of useless. But anyway is a movie made to have sequels, obviously Megatron is going to come back somehow and there’s gonna be more trouble.

This is how you revive an old franchise