Less than Meets the Eye (Oh Snap)

I just saw Transformers.

I think it gave me brain damage.

It is not very surprising, of course, that it failed to rise to the level of high art. But it didn't have to be moronic. It didn't have to be Autobot Comedy Hour. It didn't have to contain the following (approximate) dialogue, spoken in reference to the evil ringtone that the Decepticons somehow use to hack the U.S. military's computer systems:

Blonde Hacker Chick: This goes way beyond Fourier transforms. It's like quantum mechanics.

Skeptical, Uptight Military Guy: Nothing's that advanced. [Except for, well, quantum mechanics. Which describes all that is. --KH.]

Blonde Hacker Chick: This is. It's some kind of...DNA-based computer! I know that sound crazy, but...[Wow, that's so crazy it might work! And, in fact, it has worked since at least 1994, as you too can discover by looking up "DNA computing" on Wikipedia. Also, throughout the movie we are told that the Transformers are "non-biological" -- so they don't have DNA. --KH.]

No, I don't expect perfect scientific accuracy from a Michael Bay movie about alien robots that are also GM cars. But given that everyone in the audience knows that the characters are just talking bullshit, why do these people even bother? And if they feel like they have to insert pseudoscience claptrap in order to give the plot some verisimilitude, why do such a staggeringly half-assed job? Would it kill them to try Google?

At one point, we see the crafty, vicious little boombox robot downloading s33kr1t files from the Pentagon. I may have blinked at the wrong time, but as far as I could tell, most of these files consisted of old New York Times articles.

That's right: the Decepticons are so corrupt that they won't even spring for TimesSelect.

Other points:

• Fighter jets and airborne Decepticons do battle in the skies of New York (or somewhere -- it's never really explained; Wikipedia's plot summary calls it simply "a nearby city"), but the moviemakers scrupulously -- scrupulously -- avoid depicting any hot plane-on-skyscraper action. They hint, they tease, but they keep us wanting more. I guess we'll have to wait for "Cloverfield" ("it has been widely regarded as a secret movie") or, barring that, my cinematic magnum opus. (Ask me if you don't know.)

• There's a stupid Guantánamo scene, just as there was in Fantastic Four (the Silver Surfer under the knife). I smell trend piece!

• Popcorn isn't good, and I should stop eating it.

• Manohla Dargis panned the movie, and rightfully so. But her zany sentence-three punchline -- "The result is part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts" -- is absurdly off the mark. Big breasts? Where, exactly? To be sure, the way the camera treats the female lead, Megan Fox, is embarrassing and exploitative, and, a few times, acutely so. Her "tops" do perhaps fall unrealistically low. But no one in the world would leave Transformers thinking about all the boobies they saw. I mean, even in this FHM shot (awk), it's clear that the photo pervs tried pretty hard to spiff up Fox's cleavage. She's a skinny girl. (And not necessarily a bright one: "Anytime I have a feeling about anything, I get tattooed. I have a poem I wrote on my ribcage and a symbol for strength on my neck, and my boyfriend Brian [Austin Green!!]'s name tattooed next to my pie." Vomit vomit vomit. Note: those three things (a poem she wrote, strength, the loser-y guy on 90210 who put crystal meth in his orange juice so he could study better for the SAT) are the three things Megan Fox has had feelings about. They are probably her interests on Facebook.)

  Anyway: so basically Manohla Dargis thought she was on a riff-roll with her "big" thing, and she figured she would just lie her way through the final term in the series, running on feminist fumes. She takes another crack at the "Transformers hates women" idea later on, writing:

  The actors tend to be more engaging, notably Mr. LaBeouf, who brings energy and a semi-straight face to the dumbest setup. Just as easy on the eyes, though for other reasons, are the two female leads, the genius hacker in throw-her-down heels (Rachael Taylor) and the grease-monkey bombshell (Megan Fox) who helps Sam rise to the manly occasion. These walking, talking dolls register as less human and believable than the Transformers, which may be why they were even allowed inside this boy’s club.

  More nonsense. "Throw-her-down heels"? It took me just about forever to figure out what she was getting at there (possibly a copy-editing glitch), and even now I have no clue what part of the movie she's thinking of. The hacker wore heels? If that's even true, it was never emphasized. I'm not sure we ever even learned her name. Walking, talking dolls? Sure, but are they any more so than Tyrese or Josh Duhamel? Those smoldering military hunks aren't exactly fully realized characters either. I'm more than willing to entertain the thesis that Michael Bay is a sexist doofus, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a clear signal here against the noisy backdrop of generalized idiocy.

  When a movie tries so hard to paint a target on its own back, it's strange to see Dargis aiming so poorly.

• Anthony Lane also stumbles:

  The opening scene of Michael Bay’s “Transformers” takes place in deep space. Out of the darkness comes a voice that is deeper still. It makes Barry White sound like a countertenor, and this is what it says: “Before time began, there was the Cube.” Hello? Mr. Rubik?

  Again, a lousy, lazy riff. The Cube is stupid, yes. But only because of how the movie handles it later on. Why is this an intrinsically laughable idea? Because of the Rubik's cube? How is that a joke?

  And then, after describing the original line of Transformers toys, Lane writes (emphasis added):

  Now these delightful objets d’art have a movie to themselves. We should not be surprised. Long ago, when the impact of “Star Wars” was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts, and, decades later, we have reached the reductio ad absurdum of that rivalry: rather than spin the toys off from the movie, why not build the movie from the toys? “Transformers” is not the first effort in this direction; I distinctly remember finding a couchful of children enraptured by a DVD of “Barbie of Swan Lake” and realizing that Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” had not, after all, signalled the final disintegration of human personality.

  Sloppy, dumb. No, we should not be surprised. Not only is Transformers "not the first effort in [the] direction" of basing a movie on a toy line, it is not even the first Transformers movie. That came out in 1986 in America and 1989 in Japan ("although early promotional materials titled Transformers the Movie: Apocalypse! Matrix Forever [!] had promised a Summer 1987 Japanese release"). It featured Orson Welles's final movie role! Mr. Lane apparently didn't consult Wikipedia. Who cares, right? I do. You don't get to make your little point about how our culture is so degraded that now we're basing movies on toys ("when it comes to movie characterization, flesh and blood have had their chance. From here on, it’s up to metal and plastic") when the same exact degradation happened, in a directly analogous case, 21 years ago.

  Lane also remarks -- so droll! -- that

  The quarrel between the two sides [the Autobots and the Decepticons] began on their home planet. For the purposes of the movie, however, they duke it out on ours.

  The implicit joke: there's not really a good reason for the 'bots to be fighting here. But just go along with it! The movie is dumb! Yes, the movie is dumb. But this is one of the few points that it actually explains. They're duking it out here because they're all looking for the (hilarious!) Cube, which crash-landed on Earth purely by chance. "For the purposes of the movie"? Yes, but in precisely the same sense that Rosebud turns out to be Orson "Unicron" Welles's sled for the purposes of Citizen Kane. (I love the critical edge of the second paragraph in that Wikipedia entry: "Note that although Unicron would seem to be above factions like Autobot or Decepticon, his toys in the Cybertron and Titanium line were released with the Decepticons.")

  When the critics play just as fast-and-loose with the details as the big-budget auteurs do, who am I supposed to side with? Lil Wayne, Tha Carter II, "Best Rapper Alive": "Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em good, fuck 'em long, fuck 'em hard. Fuck who? Fuck 'em all." Not in a good way.