Drift Reality

In 1986, a young boy went to see a film about sacrifice, growth, and redemption that captivated his imagination and stirred his spirit.  That movie was The Transformers and it scored a 10/10 on the bad-ass scale.

In 2007, a 29-year old young(I think) man went to see a movie with the same name and left feeling dirty and used by the Michael Bay piece of crap that he had just spent the past two hours watching.

It will never cease to amaze me how Hollywood continues to destroy the relics of my childhood by overly contriving and commodifying stories that I used to love.  First, they gave the Dark Phoenix saga a golden shower; then they castrated Venom; and now this - they have turned the Transformers into a CGI-ed up version of the Village People.

Oh, it wasn’t that bad Jiyan.  With a budget of around $200 million, surely there must be some redeeming elements in the film?

Sure - there was some redeeming elements in the film:

The one thing I enjoyed about Transformers

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised that the one redeeming quality of Transformers would be the fact that it sold sex considering that Michael Bay got his start directing Playboy video centerfolds, which in fact is the only Michael Bay film I would be willing to watch in the future given the fact that he pimped the Transformers like Terrence Howard pimped Taryn Manning in Hustle & Flow.

Instead of listing out the 100 things I found disgusting about Transformers, I’m going to provide 5 suggestions for how they could have made this film bearable.  Spielberg you senile S.O.B, I hope you are listening:

1. Include characters in the movie - Guess what idiots?  People like characters.  There were no characters in this movie.  There was a crap load of boring stereotypes and some CGI robots that I couldn’t care less about.  I literally vomited in my mouth during Bernie Mac’s cameo and during Anthony Anderson’s introductory scenes (both of whom have talent), when they were both essentially asked to use their blackness to bring some flavor to the film; I almost spat out my $10 aquafina when they had the audacity to play a tragic composition when Bumblebee was trapped by the police (guess what a$%holes, you only play a tragic composition when something tragic happens); and I almost walked out during the ‘is man worth saving’ dialogue between Optimus Prime and Megatron as they rolled around like two extras from ‘Rent’ in the ”climax” to the film.  I’m not even joking when I say this movie had no characters and would have been less of a joke had there not been one word uttered in it, which brings me to my second point:  
2. Hire a screenwriter who didn’t learn to read and write from Hooked on Phonics - Immediately after the film ended I ran to the bathroom and began beating my head against the sink in an effort to forget all of the movie dialogue that had entered into my short-term memory because I realized that my IQ would drop 50 points if I committed any of the dialogue to long-term memory.  In all honesty, the dialogue from the film made me feel embarassed.  They literally tried to inject some message about humanity into the film.  Obviously, this film was not intended to be An Inconvenient Truth so why even try? 
3. Include a plot in the movie - I know it is hard to impose a narrative structure onto a two-hour long car commercial but they honestly could have tried.  There was no sense of narrative coherence in the movie, no pacing, and no plot.  It was literally a bunch of people and robots running around and speaking incoherently to one another for two hours.  Next time, try to put some semblance of a plot together - maybe even think about copying a plot from the original Transfomers series?
4. Don’t give me an epileptic seizure - I couldn’t understand what was happening in any of the battle scenes.  They wasted millions of dollars on CGI when they could have hired a bunch of Korean kids to animate the film for $10,000 bucks because no one had any idea what was happening at any point when the robots were on-screen.  The final scene was so confusing to watch that there was a kid crying in the audience.  I’m lying - that kid was me.
5. Hire a real director next time - It is one thing to hire Bay to direct The Rock or Bad Boys - stories that no one really cares about and will be gone from our culture in a few years.  It is another to hand the reigns of a brand like The Transformers over to Bay.  Next time hire someone who actually understands the cultural significance of the Transformers and cares enough to actually put some effort in.

Allright - I’m getting bored with trashing the film.  Do yourself a favor and save $10 bucks by skipping this movie and just renting the original.