Michael Bay’s Transformers runs 144 minutes and spends most of them on a teenager named Sam Witwicky. That is the film’s gamble: a war between shape-shifting alien robots, filtered through a boy trying to impress a girl. It mostly works, and the parts that don’t are loud enough to notice.
Trailer, via Paramount Movies.
Sam Witwicky Buys the Wrong Car
The plot comes in two halves that never quite shake hands. On one side, the Autobots and Decepticons fight over the AllSpark, the artifact that is the source of all Cybertronian life. Cybertron was ravaged by their civil war, and both factions want the thing badly. The Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, want to rebuild their planet. The Decepticons, led by Megatron, want to conquer the universe with it.
On the other side, Sam buys his first car. It turns out to be Bumblebee, an Autobot. The car helps him woo Mikaela Banes, then drives off at night to send a homing beacon to the other Autobots.
Shia LaBeouf plays Sam. Megan Fox plays Mikaela. Mark Ryan voices Bumblebee. Peter Cullen voices Optimus Prime, Hugo Weaving voices Megatron, and Charlie Adler voices Starscream.
The script, by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and John Rogers, keeps the human comedy running alongside the robot war. Sam holds the clue to the AllSpark’s location without knowing it. His ancestor, Captain Archibald Witwicky, found Megatron frozen in the Arctic Circle in 1897 and accidentally activated the robot’s navigational system. The coordinates imprinted on his eyeglasses.
A Secret Agency and the Hoover Dam
That detail pays off late. Sector 7, a secret U.S. government organization, found the AllSpark in the Colorado River and built the Hoover Dam around it to mask its energy emissions. The frozen Megatron was moved into the facility and reverse engineered to advance human technology. The film is patient with this, and the Hoover Dam sequence is the best argument the movie makes for itself.
The Qatar opening is the other one. The Decepticon Blackout attacks a U.S. military base and tries to hack into the military network for Megatron’s location. The base staff cut the network cable connections and stop him. Captain William Lennox, played by Josh Duhamel, and Sergeant Robert Epps, played by Tyrese Gibson, escape with a small group and photographic evidence. Blackout sends his symbiont Scorponok after them.
Their war. Our world.
That tagline is the whole movie in four words, and it is the only place the film states its theme cleanly. The rest of the time it shows you.
The Cast Around the Robots
The supporting bench is deeper than the premise suggests. Anthony Anderson plays Glen Whitmann, Rachael Taylor plays Maggie Madsen, Jon Voight plays Defense Secretary John Keller, and John Turturro plays Agent Simmons. Turturro’s Sector 7 man is the film’s best comic invention, a bureaucrat playing tough guy in a room full of machines that could flatten him.
Don Murphy started the project after the United States went to war against Iraq in 2003. He and Tom DeSanto developed it that year, and DeSanto wrote a treatment. Steven Spielberg came aboard as executive producer the following year and hired Orci and Kurtzman.
The U.S. Armed Forces and General Motors loaned vehicles and aircraft during filming. It saved money and put real hardware in the battle scenes. You can tell. The jets and trucks have weight that computer-generated robots do not.
What the Film Costs Itself
Bay can stage a set piece. He cannot always show you what happened in one. The Transformers themselves are rendered with so many moving parts that a fight becomes a blur of metal, and the camera moves so fast that the eye never settles. The 144-minute runtime is the other tax. The middle sags under government subplot and comic relief that the Hoover Dam payoff only partly justifies.
The film is the first installment of the Transformers film series, and it carries the habits of a franchise opener: too much setup, too many characters introduced for later use, a war explained instead of felt. When Optimus Prime and Megatron finally meet, the movie has spent so long getting there that the clash lands as punctuation rather than climax.
None of that erases what works. LaBeouf is genuinely funny as a kid out of his depth, and the Bumblebee relationship gives the film a heart the sequels would spend years trying to buy back. The 2007 Transformers is a big, uneven, occasionally thrilling machine. It knows its tagline is true, and it never stops trying to prove it.
The published critical score is 6.8 out of 10, the TMDB audience score from 12,521 votes. That is a fair read on a film that earns its spectacle and loses its footing in the same breath.
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