Movie Review: Transformers

A Review of the movie “Transformers” on 7/7/7, by Dr. Grouchy, Ph.D.

When I was a boy, I didn’t play with dolls. They didn’t even have robots that turned into cars or boomboxes. Hell, we had transistor radios and G.I. Joe’s and we killed ants with magnifying glasses. Most of my toys were made of wood, because they’d just invented plastic and it was still somewhat toxic. Girls did have Barbie dolls back then, but Barbie didn’t have her gay man-friend, Ken. When Barbie wanted to play horny housewife, she had to beg G.I. Joe for pity sex. Usually, Joe didn’t have the time because he was fighting war like a real man. But, I digress.

So, this appeared to be a movie about giant toys, and not about actual transformers, as my electrical engineering friend told me it would. I couldn’t figure out how they could make a movie that was over two hours long about electrical transformers, but what the hey. Anyhow, when the movie started and I realized it was produced by Hasbro, I understood this was just a ploy to sell millions of dollars of toys to American children. I suppose now, if Barbie gets bored and G.I. Joe is in Iraq fighting a war, she will have a battery-powered Transformer with multiple attachments to keep her satisfied.

As the movie starts, real men are fighting in Iraq when a helicopter lands and turns into a big, destructive robot. There is much in the way of mayhem and killing of soldiers who just want to relax with a cold beer, or a cold shower or some young boy from the desert. The robots all seem to have unlimited power. You would think their batteries would run out, or someone would have to run up and wind them up when they run down, but no. They just keep on going like some big, metal, evil Energizer Bunny. What “does” power them? It seems they never have to recharge, even in the case they have been frozen solid for decades. Is there a scientist out there that can explain that to me?

Some of the soldiers escape and they lead some kind of metal scorpion robot to the desert-boy’s village. I thought it was very considerate of them to run into a village of innocent people when being chased by a well-armed, homicidal robot. That’s what we call “collateral damage”. At first, the Pentagon suspects the Taliban might be behind the attacks, but one soldier made a home movie showing it was “Made in Korea”. Which suddenly made sense to everyone, because most toys are either made there or China. I think there were other robots that were supposed to be good, and this kid in the movie thought they came from Japan. I’m a little confused about why Korean robots would want to fight Japanese robots in America, but I think it’s because there was a big gold box that shot out sparks under the Hoover Dam. Maybe this was the electrical transformer. I’m sure you would be confused by this point as well.

The kid that I mentioned was in high school, and he wanted to get a car so he could get sex. I don’t think he bought a robot car from Bernie Mac because he wanted to have sex with the car, but you never know. I think robot-cars can be programmed to go both ways. Anyhow, he spends a lot of time in the movie not getting laid by this fairly hot high school chick. I thought she was really hot, until they showed a close-up of her thumb. It was kind of dwarfish and it turned me off. Up until that point, I was thinking about all the things I would do with a high school chick in the back seat of a robot-car. I think this was also a turn-off for the kid, because his parents soon enough caught him masturbating in his bedroom. They called the FBI, who promptly came out and arrested him for wiki-whacking, and impounded his car.

I noticed, by this point, that there was a lot of product placement in the movie. Nokia, eBay, Paypal, GMC, Pontiac, Chevrolet… to name a few. In fact, there was so much emphasis on product placement and marketing these toys, that there wasn’t much time for decent dialogue. The script seemed to be written both by and for first graders. (I would have said kindergartners, but there was way too much violence that you have to be in at least first grade to appreciate properly.) The plot was just damn weak. They had $200 million of computer-generated special effects, and a $10 script. I guess they didn’t want to make significant changes to the crappy plot of the Transformers cartoon, so one moment you would get caught up in an action sequence, and the next someone would suggest they take “the cube” to “the city” to hide it from the evil robots. I really expected Jar Jar Binks to show up any minute. In addition, all the robots had gay, made up names and mannerisms. Obviously all the Internet research the robots did on humans focused on gay porn sites.

So, who did come up with the lame script? Clearly, the premise of big-ass robots fighting is one that we have all had wet dreams about at one time or another. Why trivialize the plot with contrivances? Did they really learn our language from “the Internet”? Do the good robots all have to turn into cars? Why can’t they turn into something else? Or, were they really Cameros and Hummers on their home world? Autobots – what a stupid name. I swear, the first half of the movie I thought someone spliced in scenes from “Herbie the Love Bug”. The only thing missing was Dean Jones and Buddy Hackett.

I am always disappointed when movie-makers take liberties with reality. It isn’t like there isn’t enough that we don’t know that they can speculate about, they have to take liberties with science and historical facts. That’s just plain lazy. They could have paid a retarded monkey to do a better job of continuity on this movie, and catch such glaring mistakes like showing the “Mars Rover” and calling it the “Beagle 2”. Believe me, I had sex once with a lady from the European Space Agency, and that was no Beagle 2! Perhaps, movies are dumbed down because producers don’t think the public would understand a movie that includes facts that agree with reality. They think people are too stupid to notice things like that. Face it, they underestimate the intelligence of audiences. You aren’t just making movies for Bubba Bumfuck and his small children! You have people like Dr. Grouchy in your audience, and they expect a movie to treat reality with respect, and only then can they suspend disbelief when it comes to power cubes and giant, evil anthropomorphized robots.

At the end of the movie, the world was saved. I hope that didn’t give too much away, I forgot to put a big “SPOILER” disclaimer up. The military didn’t even confiscate the robots for further testing, they let the kid keep his Camero-bot as a pet and they dumped all the robot trash in the ocean. (Yes, the ocean will no doubt cause them to rust in time, even though it might have been more valuable to disassemble them, or safer to chop them up and dump them in a volcano. But, that wouldn’t have left such a clear starting point for the sequel.) Junior even looked like he was going to get some as he locked lips with the dwarf-thumbed woman on the hood of the yellow Camero in the closing sequence. Although, I think having sex on an Autobot is twisted and sick, given that they are another sentient (albeit mechanical) species. But, that’s exactly the kind of thing an electrical engineer would get off on, and probably why he recommended the movie to me in the first place. Sicko!