This holds true for the first one, which is by far the best of the bunch. Considering most of them were done by the all-star team of Michael Bay, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman I'm not at all surprised how the franchise has turned out so far, considering Michael Bay described it at one point as a "stupid toy movie." When you as a director have little but contempt for the material you're adapting it makes sense you might as well try and appeal to the lowest common denominator to at least earn a return.
And what a return this franchise has made, with a combined estimated box-office of roughly $3.777 billion. That's absurd, and it helps describe how these movies, which consistently get ranked as the worst of their respective years are also listed as top earners for their respective years.
Partly as celebration of the fact that I've stuck with this project and partially as an experiment in the amount of mental anguish a human mind can suffer through, I watched all four Transformers movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back over the course of one ten-hour stretch which left me exhausted both physically and mentally.
Michael Bay also has a reputation for blatant and excessive product placement, so while watching I tried to take notes on the ones I noticed. These are not exhaustive lists, as I'm 100% sure I didn't catch everything.
Without wanting to spend any more time on these than absolutely necessary, let's start.
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| Why did I do this? Please send help. |
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman (streenplay); John Rogers, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman (story)
Budget: $150,000,000
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Anderson, Megan Fox, Rachael Taylor, John Turturro, Jon Voight
The first Transformers movie is by far the most legitimate of the series. I admit that might not be saying much, but when you watch all four in sequence the relative quality stands out starkly against the others.
First off, the action scenes and transforming are done with a little restraint. That's going to be a word I use a fair amount in this post: restraint. Mostly because Michael Bay will lose what little he possesses in 2009, but at least it aided this movie a bit. The transformations are shot clearly, and the actual action scenes aren't quite as explosion-y as people like to think. Though there's still a fair amount of shaky-cam I had little trouble following what was actually happening.
The actors at least seem to try and take this seriously. I've never actually disliked Shia LaBeouf and I think he did a fine job in this movie as a bumbling teenager. His recent...performances (the Stream With Me in particular) have warmed me up to him a bit more, but I didn't find him annoying in this. Instead, it's his shrieking yuppie parents who drive me up the damn wall. Kevin Dunn does his Dunnest, and is fine as Sam's dad, but Julie White channels her most insufferable for her role as his mom.
Duhamel plays Military Guy, who doesn't have much development aside from the occasional shot of his wife and infant daughter, but we all know that he's not going to die and will instead shoot his way inexplicably through these three movies. Bernie Mac shows up and is the funniest part of this movie, aside from the humor I got watching Megan Fox "act." Yeah, she's exactly as bad as everyone said, and it only gets worse.
The performances would be fine for a dumb toy movie if the script wasn't also an excuse to crash CGI robots against each other every forty minutes. The plot agents follow Sam around until someone else shows up to pick up the strings; the junkyard dogs literally vanish between cuts as Bumblebee arrives, Mikayla's criminal background is dropped just as quickly as it was brought up, and the Hollywood science is so nonsensical that I almost would have preferred hackers mashing on keyboards instead of...finding a signal by zooming into the graphic that represents the radio signal? What?
We see hints of what Michael Bay would be ridiculed for in the coming years, but not so strongly in this one: everyone has orange skin (even the hackers, generals, politicians...everyone), every interior is blue for no reason, and the windows whenever someone is driving are filled with the laziest greenscreen effects in recent memory. Seriously, if you ever get the chance, look at what Bay's effects guys superimpose into the car windows during driving scenes:
Daytime? Blinding white light, no visible scenery.
Night time? Black background, random lights moving in no discernible pattern
The windows were open during the driving scenes and there still wasn't anything visible from them.
I remember when this movie came out there was a huge amount of marketing around it, including a contest for the internet to vote on a line for Optimus to say. The winner for a while was "Do a barrel roll" but I think it was replaced by some generic line about sentient beings right to live free or something. Very memorable.
Product Placement: Burger King, Chevrolet, eBay, Porsche, XBox, Mountain Dew, DeWalt, CBS, XM Radio, GMC, Blackberry, Nokia, Panasonic, Pontiac, Yahoo.
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| Spoiler alert: the pyramids are the bad guys. |
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Budget: $200,000,000
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro
This is the movie with the robot Jesuses in it. Jesii? Jesupodes?
Anyway one of the problems we start to see in the "arc" starting here is that the mythology behind the Transformers themselves is never consistent between movies. Each one invents a new addition to the backstory which feels like it should be enough to cover a series, but it's entirely resolved within that movie. Spoilers, there is an ancient Cybertronian artifact in each of these movies, they each do something different, and I don't care about any of them.
From the very first it's notable that the action scenes have already dipped in quality. The amount of cuts in the fight scene with the giant wheel Decepticon is absurd, and it's accompanied by a serious lack of continuity and over-reliance on explosions as character development.
The principal cast returns for this one, but every character seems to have had his or her dial turned up a few notches. LaBeouf has plenty of opportunities to stutter, babble, screech, and otherwise ham it up, the military characters have about six lines each that amount to nothing, and Turturro is goofing around like a madman. Newcomer s Ramon Rodriguez and Rainn Wilson both steal the show and seem to understand that this won't be a good mark on either of their respective resumes. Special mention goes to Wilson's portrayal of the Astronomy 101 professor, who's entire scene was so hilariously over-the-top that I remember wondering whether I had walked into the wrong theater when I had originally seen it. The word I would describe everyone is "manic."
Otherwise the attempts at humor are delivered primarily through the new Autobots, Mudflap and Skids, who are possibly the most racist characters I've seen in any mainstream movie. Yes, more racist than whichever character(s) just popped into your head. One of them has a gold tooth and at one point it's revealed that neither of them can read. Combined with how they act, how they sound, and their general design and writing and it's profoundly uncomfortable watching them minstrel their way through the movie. If you do a Google search for "Michael Bay racist" then Mudflap and Skids show up all over the first page.
Overall this feels like the point in the series where it becomes noticeably Michael Bay-ish, but not full-on Bay. The actors are still putting some effort into their performances (Dunn saying goodbye to LaBeouf at the end is stellar compared to the rest of the movie) but the rest of it starts to feel really lazy. In order to avoid any tough writing decisions the movie falls back on weird, out-of-place robo-mysticism and ancient robot-Jesus prophecy/destiny stuff. The orange-and-blue aesthetic has only deepened, the Fallen's "revenge" is never quite explained, and the actor's manic performances made me sigh in confusion more often than not.
Product Placement: OnStar, State Farm, Mountain Dew, Cisco, Cherolet, Bad Boys II, GMC, Skymall.
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| At this point I'm just tired. |
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger
Budget: $195,000,000
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand
By the time this movie entered production the series had already developed a reputation and you can tell from watching it. On the Bay Scale this movie ranks pretty high. The actors at this point have given up on trying to elevate the script at all, and the performances throughout made me wonder why I wasn't just watching a cartoon.
The new faces this time include Patrick Dempsey who is having a wonderful time playing a massive asshold traitor, Ken Jeong who plays his character for laughs and nothing else, and John Malkovich playing what I suspect he thinks Michael Bay would be like if he ran a company. Frances McDormand shows up to deliver her lines and get mad about Turturro's character acting all Turturro, and at times it feels like she's trying to put something into her character but every time she shows up with more than two others her delivery is so flat.
Not returning this time is Megan Fox, who was in a well-publicized spat with Michael Bay about how they couldn't stand each other, so she's replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who...is in the movie at parts, and says her lines. Really, it was her casting that confirmed for me that this was Bay caving to the dark voice in the back of his mind which demanded hotter women and faster cars, because that's what this movie amounted to. If he wanted to maintain some speck of credibility for this franchise beyond summer explosions, he could have just left out a romance, because her character does pretty much nothing that anyone else could have done better.
The one bright point in the cast is Alan Tudyk as Turturro's assistant, but I think that's just my residual good-will from Firefly.
The bad guy is also voiced by Leonard Nimoy, and his betrayal is clumsily foreshadowed by no less than three references to The Wrath of Khan or other Star Trek incidents where Spock did something mean.
As a story this is also where the series starts to splinter. While the first two weren't masterpieces of story structure or plot, this felt almost like an attempt to retool the franchise into a different arc. The first film and Revenge dealt with the Transformers arriving on Earth, but you can't reasonably carry that out for another 2.5 hours, so we have to move onto something different.
For most of the movie that amounts to showing the Autobots and Decepticons goofing around on Earth. The Autobots fight America's wars for them, and the Decepticons...blackmail CEOs? Any talk of leaving the planet is treated as nonsense and dismissed without any real attention given to it. Then Optimus refers to Earth as their new home and after a single attempt to get them to leave they just stay here. Alright then.
One acceptable thing I can say about this movie is that the Decepticon invasion of Chicago feels appropriately hopeless. The city gets curb-stomped without much resistance, and I honestly feel like this series would have been far better if it had been focused on humanity reacting to a sudden, violent invasion by the Decepticons, and then the Autobots showed up. Either way, there's a lot of collateral damage in this movie, with people getting violently exploded, vaporized, torn apart, and killed in other graphic manners on screen. At one point a group of people is vaporized and leaves behind a little rolling pile of bones.
Otherwise there's a lot more slow-motion, a lot more bad CGI (including a really, really bad animated LeBeouf at one point) and further deepening of the orange-and-blue, except that this time the people can be blue and the interiors can be orange. Score one for innovation, boys!
Ultimately, though this is technically classified as a sci-fi action film I think it's more appropriate at this point to start calling them sci-fi action-comedies, because no one on this production was taking any part of this seriously.
Product Placement: Pepto Bismol, Nike, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, Cisco, Bud Light (with label turned towards camera).
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| I regret everything. |
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Ian Bryce
Written by: Ehren Kruger
Budget: $210,000,000
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Sophia Myles, Li Bingbing, Titus Welliver, T.J. Miller
First off, immediate points taken off for not marketing it as Trans4mers. Instead you let Fant4stic have it.
This was a reboot disguised as a sequel using the same canon with a new cast, mostly new robots, and new reasons to dislike it.
The new cast includes Wahlberg, who does just fine as an inventor-father and is obviously putting more effort into his performance than the rest of the cast. T.J. Miller dies early on, but he's essentially playing the same character that he does in Silicon Valley. Nikola Peltz hasn't improved a bit since her hilarious show in The Last Airbender, but instead of being dull and flat she's reaching for a dramatic weight she just can't quite grasp. Titus Welliver brings some measure of sinister to his performance, but he can't pull himself above what the script gives him. Stanley Tucci's entire entourage is so comically over the top that its parody of techie companies and personalities like Apple and Elon Musk makes the entire movie feel like a parody of the earlier franchise.
Combine this with the fact that Bay has suddenly decided that dutch angles are so him and you have the first Transformers movie that I would describe as off-kilter. Maybe zany is a better word for this, from the acting to the script to the action. Slow motion is used for the most mundane of actions...I'm fairly sure that at one point it was used when the group was sitting around. About halfway through the movie it occurred to me that at this point Bay has essentially proven that his movies earn a huge return, so Paramount/Hasbro is just letting him do whatever he wants and he's running with it.
The "racism" checkbox once occupied by Skids and Mudflap has been replaced by Drift, a samurai Autobot voiced by Ken Watanabe with the most cliche Asian-Master "Find your inner compass" crud I've seen in a long time. The rest of the new 'bots are distinguishable pretty much only by the color of their armor, while I don't remember the Dinobots (oh yeah, they show up for about 15 minutes at the end) ever actually getting names in the movie itself.
At least Lockdown is kind of a cool villain, even if he's essentially only there to set up the next myth arc for the movies. This time it isn't resolved by the end, though, so maybe Transformers 5 (expected in 2016-2017 and maybe written by "genius" Akiva Goldsman) will have some actual weight to its story.
Judging by this one, however, I wouldn't think so. The stunts in this are Looney Tunes caliber, the script is hilariously blunt ("I designed Galvatron after Optimus Prime, why does he keep looking like Megatron?"), and the direction was obviously intended for 3D with things zooming and distorting at the camera.
The final act moves the movie to China, specifically Hong Kong, in an attempt to increase revenue from Chinese audiences. Considering the movie opened at $91.2 million in China and earned over 75% of its total box office overseas, it seems to have worked despite the fact that the setting makes no sense within the story and actively contradicts what the villain said to do.
Oh, and one final thing to hammer home how lazily this movie was assembled: there were a total of nine different aspect ratios used in this movie, and it switches between them randomly, sometimes within the same conversation. I didn't catch it for a while, but once I noticed it was hard not to be distracted every time it happened, which came to several times per minute. This is not a joke, and I cannot fathom how it wasn't fixed in editing.
I don't really have a conclusion for this one, because it's really bad. Even though it has some alright ideas and I appreciate the attempt to move the franchise forward, this movie is a piece of trash and I wish it was the seal on a truly depressing franchise.
Product Placement: CNN, CBS, Budweiser, Red Bull, Beats Pill, Cherolet, Oreo, Bud Light, Good Year, My Little Pony...there are so many that there is a 12 minute long video online compiling just the product placement shots in the movie.
The Franchise
Combined Estimated Budget: $755,000,000
Combined Total Box-Office: $3,777,000,000
Total Runtime: 613 minutes (10 hours, 13 minutes)
Number of Times Shia LeBeouf should have died: At least 6
Number of Beers I Drank During the Duration: Not enough
If I had to use one word to describe this franchise, it would be bloated. Every movie feels about an hour too long, with unbelievable amounts of filler and soulless motion scenes. As an event it was strange watching four essentially identical movies descend into madness and what I can only assume was cocaine-induced mania, but it wasn't entertaining.
Should You Watch it?
No.
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