Transformers

July 6, 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 27

A fun feature of learning new languages is how they express common ideas using different combinations of words. In French, one doesn’t say “I brush my teeth in the morning”, one says “le matin, je me brosse les dents”, literally “the morning, I brush myself the teeth”. In Japanese one expresses “how are you?” with the phrase “元気ですか？/ Genkidesu ka?” literally meaning “are you healthy?” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a Thai turn of phrase. When presented with a foodstuff one finds objectionable, the phrase used is not “I don’t like eating this” or “this tastes bad” but “กินไม่เป็น / Kin mị̀ pĕn”, literally meaning “I don’t know how to eat this”. While it doubtless is primarily used when a dish is poorly constructed or of low quality, it suggests a world where a bit more knowledge or the right context or outlook could render the dish palatable. It’s a phrase I think about sometimes when I feel like the biggest killjoy for not liking a piece of art that’s broadly beloved. It’s not that Transformers (2007) is objectively a bad movie, I just don’t know how to watch it.

Transformers is the story of a group of alien robots who have come to Earth in search of a source of limitless energy at times referred to as “the allspark” or “the cube”. The benevolent Autobots led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) wish to use the cube for good, while the evil Decepticons led by Megatron (Hugo Weaving) wish to use the power of the cube to dominate all life in the galaxy. Blissfully unaware of this, LA teen Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBoeuf) just wants to get a cool car and some spending money so that he can impress his crush Mikaela (Megan Fox). While attempting to raise funds for this purchase, Sam puts his great grandfather’s eyeglasses on ebay, which unbeknownst to him contains coordinates in the Arctic Ocean of the cube. In so doing he has attracted the attention of a cool new robot friend named Bumblebee, a member of a secretive government intelligence agency (John Turturro), and the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight). Oh yeah, also the robots can turn into other stuff, like cars and jets and stuff for… reasons. Hence Transformers. Anyway the robots all fight each other in downtown LA and justice triumphs or something.

One of the robots pees on John Turrurro

I wish to make something clear: I didn’t enjoy watching Transformers but I’m also not a snob about big budget action movies. I very much enjoy turning my brain off and watching explosions for a couple of hours. If you’ve talked to me for more than five minutes you know that Point Break (1991) is one of my favorite movies of all time. I gave Ghost Rider four stars in this very newsletter. I don’t even dislike Michael Bay as a director. I love Bad Boys II (2003) and The Rock (1996). I’m not even snobbish about the concept of the Transformers. Alien robots who turn into cars is a profoundly silly idea but it’s a silly idea I’m on board for. I loved the original cartoons as a kid, despite the fact that I now recognize that they’re mostly unwatchable as an adult¹. I’m also not so precious about childhood artifacts that I’m incapable of enjoying new takes on them. The problem is that this film takes a bunch of big swings and whiffs on every last one of them.

The film’s protagonist is Sam Witwicky, a hapless loser who gets bullied by awful jocks and mocked by his peers. Sam is probably the only teen I’ve seen on screen who gets bullied and I felt deserved it. As long as art has concerned itself with the lives of adolescents, there have been bullied and misunderstood teens at its center, from Huckleberry Finn to Bottoms (2023). For this trope to work though, there needs to be some understanding that the teen in question has a rich inner life and is maligned for superficial reasons. Duckie from Pretty In Pink (1986) might be a little intense but he’s got the soul of an artist and is a hopeless romantic. George McFly from Back To The Future (1985) is awkward and dorky but he’s also creative and sweet. Sam Witwicky is irritating to talk to, but he’s also mercurial and really horny. Like… really horny. Unpleasantly horny. He’s Ducky without the artistry. He’s George without the creativity. It turns out when you take away those qualities of your bullied teen, they’re just awkward and awful. I have zero sympathy for the teen whose “relatable” foible is that he’s trying to sell his great grandfather’s arctic exploration artifacts on ebay so that he can have the spending cash to go to Applebees. Get a job, loser.

When not following the antics of the worst teen, a great deal of the action of the film follows a cohort of American soldiers stationed in Qatar as they encounter a Deceptacon that destroys their base. No individual part of this storyline is problematic, but taken as a whole the plotline rubs me the wrong way. Almost as a counterpoint to Witwicky, the soldiers’ personalities all feel focus grouped to death to make sure they’re all perfect encapsulations of what’s great about American society. In the first five minutes we are told that these men love baseball, cold beer, their wives, and their grandma’s étouffée. In the meantime with the exception of one adorable child, the local Qatari population is represented as a series of one-dimensional stereotypes. They live in small villages built out of ruins in the middle of the desert and dress in turbans and robes and have an AK-47 on hand to use at the drop of a hat in the instance of… evil alien robots I guess. In a vacuum it’s a kind of plodding soldier’s war story. In 2007 in the midst of a seemingly interminable war against Iraqi insurgents the story of the perfect and noble American soldiers in the Middle-Eastern desert amongst personality-free Arab stereotypes the story feels a little gross.

The most unpleasant thing about watching this movie was the robots themselves. In a movie that’s predominantly about robots this is a problem. The way Michael Bay opts to depict the Transformers is as a series of wires and pistons with the barest hints of paneling that suggests the objects they transform into. The overall aesthetic is not unlike industrial manufacturing robots that are effectively purpose-built arms used to weld car frames together. With industrial manufacturing robots these are clearly understood to be tools, and their lack of aesthetics is understandable. The Transformers however are human-shaped (when they’re not car or jet shaped), which renders the minimal aesthetic and sinewy design not unlike a human skeleton and muscular system without skin, which just isn’t a pleasant thing to behold.

this is the friend robot. the enemy robots are even more strange looking

Ironically, the worst thing about the Transformers design is the nature of their transformations. In the original animation (and crucially, in the original line of toys) the nature of how the robots turned into cars was easily comprehensible and understandable. Optimus Prime’s chest is the cab of a big rig truck. His hands come out of where the headlights are. His stomach is the truck’s grille and his legs turn into the fifth wheel coupling and rear suspension. He is clearly understood as both a humanoid robot and a big rig truck. In Bay’s version some vestiges of that original design remain, but mostly he reads as a big weird looking robot man. When he transforms it’s not that we see a series of about a dozen comprehensible movements that turn truck into robot, instead we see flashes and close ups of hundreds of tiny movements that incomprehensibly render him as truck one minute and robot the next. There’s no understanding of how it works. Maybe that’s the point, maybe it’s supposed to be that the robotics are so advanced that to our tiny human mind they may as well be magical, but I can’t help but feel like something is lost when we can’t see how the Transformers in the movie Transformers transform.

There are many other dislikable things about Transformers but I won’t bore you with them. The movie most of all just feels dull. It runs a little too long and the plot is a little too complex and there’s just not enough John Turturro in it. As much as Michael Bay was clearly trying to grab my attention, that grasp just kept slipping away. If I weren’t paying attention enough to write about it I’d likely have napped a little in the middle.

But here’s the thing: People love this shit. Transformers is the beginning of one of the most enduring mega-franchises of the past 18 years. Admittedly it’s the Hydrox to the MCU’s Oreos (both in that it sold less and also actually arrived first), but still, Transformers films have caused $5 billion in ticket revenue. I can point to the things that I dislike about this film but all of those things are so subjective that I can’t really say that it’s a meaningfully bad movie. If you love this movie and the series it spawned, please let me know. Tell me what you love about it, because I feel like I’ve lost touch with reality when I find out that this movie of all things has spawned seven sequels. It’s also very hard for me to say that this is the dogshit I feel like it is. I just don’t know how to watch it.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ If you’re in the mood for giant robots, Pacific Rim (2013) is a better use of your time, and I say that knowing full well that Pacific Rim is also not a very good movie.

Economics: Transformers opened on the weekend of July 4, 2007 at number one at the box office ahead of Ratatouille in its second week of release. It would go on to make $1 billion between its domestic box office ($319 million), international box office ($389 million), and home video sales ($305 billion), making it one of the greatest returns on investment in the film business against its $147 million budget. Two of its sequels (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers: Dark of the Moon) would outperform it financially. The franchise in total has made over $5 billion, which is more than the Ford Motor Company’s profits were in 2024 ($4.3 billion)

1. An exception to this is the shockingly well made animated feature Transformers: The Movie (1986), which works magnificently well as a stand-alone space opera and also contains Orson Welles’s final performance, of which he said “I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen."