Oy, Robot

It may surprise you to hear this but director Michael Bay is actually a very economical filmmaker. Obviously I'm not speaking in terms of dollars here but rather in terms of storytelling. By stringing together a few well-chosen, split-second shots (Hummers pull up, boots step out, slow-mo tracking shot of the team walking), Mr. Bay is able to set up a scene in such a way that the audience knows exactly where they are: they're in Bay country. Certainly, this technique is much easier than dealing with pesky indulgences like exposition or character development. And it allows the filmmaker to get to the next manic action sequence all that much quicker. These Bay trademarks serve the director well in his Hasbro toy adaptation "Transformers" - the ne plus ultra of boys-with-toys movies. And who better to make it than our most gleefully destructive filmmaker himself?

Mr. Bay has always been a kind of cross between Tony Scott and Roland Emmerich, so it's appropriate that his "Transformers" borrows so much from Mr. Emmerich's 1996 July 4th extravaganza "Independence Day". It seems that the warring factions of the planet Cybertron - the benevolent Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced, as in the 80s cartoons, by the James Earl Jones of the series Peter Cullen) and the sinister Decepticons (I mean, they're called Decepticons, who are they fooling exactly?) led by the mega-evil Megatron - have come to Earth in search of the "All Spark", a sort of Big-Bang-in-a-box which can turn any machine into a living thing. If only Pinocchio had gotten a hold of this thing. There are many "whys" and "hows" in the script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who collaborated on Mr. Bay's 2005 cloning dud "The Island" as well as the underappreciated "Mission: Impossible III") but when you're dealing with a movie about morphing machines who say things like "My bad" and pee gasoline, you learn to let a lot slide.

On the human side of things, we have the ubiquitous Shia LaBeouf (this kid's the real deal, by the way) as the inexplicably-named Sam Witwicky. Sam is the descendant of an Arctic explorer with the coordinates of the All Spark embedded in his eyeglasses (please don't ask), so he becomes the unwitting target of both Autobot and Decepticon. He's also given arm candy in the form of Megan Fox. Ms. Fox's character is one of these Michael Bay concoctions: a perfectly-bodied 11th grade girl with an ex-con Dad, full-time lip gloss, and the knowledge to dis- and re-assemble a car engine in no time flat. A startling amount of time is spent setting up a relationship between Ms. Fox and Mr. LaBeouf. Meanwhile, entire scenes could have been cut without detracting from the movie at all. The same could be said of the military mumbo-jumbo in the film, presided over by Jon Voight (getting his Rumsfeld on as the Secretary of Defense) and John Turturro, as the wacky head of some secret military organization with a hidden bunker borrowed wholesale from "Independence Day".

As for the Transformers themselves, they are so intricately over-designed - and Mr. Bay's camera is in such constant motion - that it's tough to get a real idea of what they look like. I defy anyone who's seen the film to draw me a picture of one of the 'bots. The Transformers are as loosely strung together as the film's acting scenes. But I might be nitpicking here. The "Transformers" film is made for young boys by men who are still young boys at heart. There's plenty of wanton destruction, big explosions and lots of noisy robot-on-robot action. And that's exactly what you'd want from a "Transformers" movie. Unlike the titular machines, there's no more to "Transformers" than meets the eye.