| Sam: |
My bitchin’ Camaro is really a Robot in Disguise™. |
| Mikaela: |
As the stereotypical “bad girl” I must fall in love with you. |
| Maggie: |
Overweight Computer Nerd, do you understand these alien signals? |
| Glen: |
Sorry, Hot Programmer Chick. I’m hillariously incompetent even though you think I’m a hacker. |
| Maggie: |
I guess we’re not really relevant to the plot after all. |
| Optimus Prime: |
Now that the movie is half-over, I will show up and be incredibly boring. I’ll kill my enemy and thus minimize the chance of a sequel. |
| Angry Rob: |
Damn you, Michael Bay! For $10, I want more than a teen sex comedy! |
(Yeah, it’s been a year. Sue me. Mia hasn’t sent me anything new in a long time.)
For those that miss Mia: HAI BAY NEXT TIME LESS TEEN WANKING COMEDY MORE KILLER ROBOT ACTION KTHXBYE.
Anyway, you’re probably aware that I have a slight passing familiarity with the mythology (both comic book and television series), and now the movie introduces a third divergent story line.
Never mind that the comic and the TV series agreed that the robots arrived millions of years ago, their spacecraft crashing into the base of Mount Hillary and being subsequently buried by the resultant eruption. Never mind the whole hunger-for-energy goal. Or space bridges. Or Quintessons. Michael Bay went for the most pathetic MacGuffin he could find to justify blowing up a city, and he dredged it out of the lamest sub-plot of the comic book and placed it into the hands of the most pathetic hero to grace the screen in a decade.
Attention Michael Bay: The robots are supposed to be the main characters. Sam (or Spike) Whitwicky is an incidental, a foil against which the Autobots appear perfectly heroic and the Decepticons appear perfectly vile. What Bay uses him for is a crime: an excuse to introduce a surfeit of bathroom humor and to relegate the robots to be nothing more than elaborate props uniting three disparate and uninspiring storylines.
I’ll say it again: props. The Autobots are clunky and uninspiring, dim-witted and inept. Where is the Optimus Prime who inspired awe and admiration in friend and foe alike, steadfast and assured, sharing no emotion save for the occasional one-liner which he tosses out like a metallic James Bond? He’s certainly not in this movie. This Optimus is too busy ruining gardens with his oversized feet.
And don’t even get me started on Bumblebee’s “oil leak.”
The problem is that Michael Bay only knows how to make one type of movie: love amongst the explosions. Pearl Harbor? Love amongst exploding Japanese bombs. The Island? Love amongst exploding clones. Transformers? Love amongst exploding robots. God only knows what he’d do with something like My Fair Lady: Henry Higgins would be experimenting with nitroglycerine by the second half.
What angers me isn’t that the movie was bad, but so much potential was lost. In the hands of a more competent director it could have been epic, on par with the animated feature; instead, we were treated to a sad remake of Batteries Not Included except with more masturbation jokes.