Transformers

Megan Fox, in an interview with Maxim (my go-to source for info on college-age starlets) said that Transformers was "the best film Michael Bay has ever directed." Let's pause to contemplate how fraught with ambiguity that statement is. Is it merely hype from a girl trying to put fannies in the seats, or is it a sardonic, back-handed compliment, kind of like saying someone is the world's tallest midget?

I caught up with this film over the Thanksgiving weekend, and I give thanks for Megan, who may just be the most beautiful female human being walking the planet. She is so good-looking it hurts. I think if I were ever in her presence I would just sizzle and melt like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. In Transformers she plays the hottest girl in high school, natch, who happens to know her way around a car engine and has a juvie record, which only heightens her appeal.

I am not in the demographic for this movie. I understand that the genesis of this was a Hasbro toy--vehicles that with a few twists and turns could be turned into robots. This led to a cartoon series, and eventually a summer special effects extravaganza that grossed over 200 million domestic. I have never played with the toy or saw the cartoon, being in my twenties by the time it hit, but there is evidently a large population of kids who now in their twenties and thirties who did, as well as current kids, who enjoy this sort of thing.

I have a hard time understanding how anyone over thirteen could tolerate this nonsense. We have a dumb storyline about how these sentient robots, who can manipulate themselves into common machines, do battle over the future of mankind. They find a kid, Shia LeBoeuf, whose ancestor had a key piece of information that is now in his hands. He and the hot chick end up being involved in this, best summed up by LeBoeuf's line, "I bought a car and it turned out to be an alien robot."

There are further inanities, such as John Turturro hamming it up as a secret agent, Jon Voight visually pained while playing the Secretary of Defense, and another hot chick, this time a blonde Australian, playing a computer expert while running around in fuck-me pumps. All this and the fact that the robots have given themselves names that they could have lifted off the doodles of a third-grader's notebook, like Megatron, Ironhide, and Starscream. The head good-guy robot is called Optimus Prime. Wouldn't a sentient robot from an advanced race know that his name is an oxymoron?

At least this film knows it's dumb. Several times the script winks at the camera, indicating a level of camp. But there is good cheese and bad cheese, and this is pretty bad. The only way to tolerate this sort of thing, aside from watching Megan Fox, is imagining what the robots from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 would do to it.

And is this the best Michael Bay film ever? Taking a look at his filmography, which I realize I've seen an alarmingly high percentage of, I would say no. He was the director of a Playboy Playmate Video back in 1990. I would say that remains his crowning achievement.