Transformers (2007) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Autobots, roll out!

Transformers was a long-awaited, live-action adaptation of a fan-favorite animated series and toy line from the 1980s. It brought the incredible giant transforming robots to the screen in an action format directed by Michael Bay. Love it or hate it, the film changed the way that big-budget action/sci-fi films were made and marketed.

First Impressions

A teenage boy is taken by his father to buy a used car. That night the car transforms into a giant robot. The President is shown a secret bunker where another giant robot is being held. Destruction soon ensues as these giant robots wreak havoc on Los Angeles. The titles mention that some of the robots are here to protect humanity. It’s the first live-action film adaptation of the Transformers franchise!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At some time in the past a device known as The Cube created life on another planet. A war broke out and The Cube was lost “to the far reaches of space,” eventually ending up on Earth. In the present day, a helicopter attacks a US military base in Qatar. It is revealed to be a robot that transforms into a helicopter, Blackout–one of a group of alien beings known as Decepticons. It and another alien robot, Scorponok, attempt to download some files from the military computer mainframe before being cut off by soldiers.

Outside Mission City, in the southwestern United States, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his father Ron (Kevin Dunn) visit a used car dealership and purchase a beat-up yellow and black Camaro for the boy’s first car. One night his car drives away from his house. Thinking it has been stolen, he follows it to see it miraculously transform into a yellow robot, Bumblebee (Mark Ryan), who shines a beacon into the skies. On board Air Force One, a small robot, Frenzy–disguised as a boombox–hacks into the military network, generating a strange signal and gets one piece of information needed: the last name Witwicky.

Survivors of the Qatar attack, which include Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson) are attacked by, and defeat, Scorponok. They are called home by Secretary of Defense Keller (Jon Voight) who is busy with NSA analyst Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor) attempting to decode the origin of the mysterious signals. Sam realizes his car wants to help him when they are chased by a Decepticon disguised as a police car; Barricade (Jess Harnell). They manage to escape and Bumblebee introduces Sam and Mikaela (Megan Fox), a local girl who has become mixed-up with the events, to his fellow Autobots–led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen).

Prime explains to Sam and Mikaela about the All-Spark, a power source (also referred to as The Cube), which they must find before Megatron (Hugo Weaving) does. He is the Decepticon leader who crashed on Earth eons ago and was discovered in the Arctic by Sam’s grandfather (or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather–all are mentioned, take your pick). Sam, Mikaela, and Bumblebee are captured by agents from the secret government group Sector Seven, led by Agents Simmons (John Turturro).

They are taken to Sector Seven’s secret base hidden under Hoover Dam, along with Keller, Maggie, and her hacker friend Glen (Anthony Anderson) where they are shown a giant cube and a frozen giant robot, known as NBE-One. Prime and the other Autobots, Jazz (Darius McCrary), Ironhide (Jess Harnell), and Ratchet (Robert Foxworth) discover the location of The Cube and move to intercept the Decepticons who are also en route.

Sam convinces Simmons to release Bumblebee to help defend them as Frenzy and other Decepticons attack the base, shutting down the power that is keeping Megatron in stasis. Bumblebee reduces the building-sized All Spark to a small foot-long cube for easy extradition. The military decides to take the cube to local Mission City and hide it. Unfortunately, that just attracts the giant robots who rain havoc and destruction throughout the city. Sam risks his life to save The Cube, and plunges into Megatron’s chest–which causes the giant robot to die. Prime takes a sliver of the All Spark for himself as he transmits a message to other Autobots that they are waiting on Earth.

“I think there’s a lot more than meets the eye with you.” – Sam Witwicky

History in the Making

Transformers marks the culmination of a 22-year wait for a live-action version of the popular toy and cartoon franchise of the same name. Debuting in 1984 Hasbro Toys released an imported variation of Takara’s Japanese line of Diaclone and Micro Change transforming robots, themselves an offshoot of their popular Microman line (which was being sold in the United States as Micronauts). By September of the same year, the first season of The Transformers animated cartoon showed up in syndication, along with a monthly comic book series from Marvel Comics, both of which included mechanic Sparkplug Witwicky and his sons Spike and Buster. The entire franchise was a huge hit that spawned many other toys, cartoons, comics, as well as The Transformers: The Movie in 1986.

By early 2003, producer Don Murphy was planning to create a GI Joe film, based on another extremely popular Hasbro toy line, but the invasion of Iraq by the United States led to a decision that a Transformers film might be a better choice. The following year Steven Spielberg signed on as a Producer and brought in screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman to perform a rewrite, as well as offering the film to director Michael Bay. He initially balked at the idea of directing a toy movie but relented seeing the opportunities for his patented “Bay-hem” style of directing.

One of the taglines for the toy line Is “There’s more than meets the eye.” Is that true here? Well, there’s certainly plenty to look at. But I’d have to answer no. The film is extremely superficial, and probably the worst of the seven Michael Bay films he directed to date. It’s certainly the worst of the three sci-fi films, beating The Island and Armageddon. The camerawork is dizzying, providing little respite in the two-hour twenty-minute runtime. Bay demonstrates that he thinks more about moving the camera on set rather than how the editing of those movements will be cut together. The vertigo-inducing choreography makes it difficult to follow the action due to the subject switching screen locations during shots. The best example of staged frenetic camerawork is Mad Max: Fury Road where George Miller kept the main action framed in the center of the shot, allowing quick cuts, without the audience needing to refocus their attention. Plot-wise, Transformers has only about as much plot as any of the 22-minute cartoons of the 80s. There’s only superficial characterization, with so much of the focus being on the fact that there are giant freakin’ robots transforming on screen. However, of the six main films in the Transformers franchise, this initial film is still the best-rated of the Transformers-labeled films. There is one better Transformers film but it does not carry that label. Bumblebee blows all previous, and later, Transformers films away proving that actually creating characters that audiences care about can work–even with giant transforming robots.

Genre-fication

Giant robots in sci-fi films are not a new invention. Movies such as the live-action Robot Jox, or the animated Mobile Suit Gundam and The Iron Giant all feature either mecha’s used by humans or sentient robots–both elements that Transformers incorporates. The inspiration for the original toy line from Japan comes from a long line of robotic and science-fiction related properties including Microman and the Shogun Warriors, but may also have been influenced by the Godzilla franchise and his battle with Mechagodzilla. Transformers also incorporates allusions and references to other more recent (and non-robotic) sci-fi films, such as Michael Bay’s own Armageddon, and Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The E.T. elements relate to Sam’s relationship with Bumblebee (the extra-terrestrial in this case), and their separation by government agents, which Sam cries over, and which Spielberg described as a story about “a boy and his car.”

The film opened the floodgates for not only more Transformers films but more films with giant robots in them. This was the first film of six that featured the name Transformers between 2007 and 2023. These include Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Dark of the Moon (2011), Age of Extinction (2014), The Last Knight (2017), and most recently Rise of the Beasts (2023). There was also the film Bumblebee, which has been the most successful of the franchise to date and was a prequel. There is also a new animated prequel, Transformers One, which opens in late September 2024–continuing forty years of rock ‘em, sock ‘em robotic action. But there have been other franchises and robotic films of varying degrees including Real Steel, and the Pacific Rim series–which may owe more to the Gundam characters than Transformers.

Societal Commentary

Transformers at least asks some bigger, philosophical questions, right? Not by a long shot! Cars, girls, and conspiracies–in that order–are the major (juvenile) themes of the film. This should surprise no one as Bay’s style is targeted towards teenage boys. With the cars being the disguised versions of the Autobots, the filmmakers were allowed to utilize actual automobiles for scenes involving the robots in disguise. Several designs were updated for the film with Jazz (normally a Porsche) becoming a Pontiac Solstice, and Bumblebee (a classic Volkswagen beetle) becoming a yellow Camaro instead. Some fans were upset by the change of vehicles that characters transformed into, believing it was only changed for change’s sake. With Bay’s sensibilities, the majority of these car scenes became glory shots, complete with lens flares that made it look as if they came from car commercials.

I guess I could make something up about the anxiety of puberty for this section, but the depiction of women in Transformers has more to do with stereotypical male fantasy and fear than it does with anything in reality. There are three types of women in the film. Correction, there are three women in the film: Mikaela Banes (whose name sounds oddly close to Michael Bay’s), Maggie Madsen, and Judy Witwicky (Julie White) Sam’s mother. Mikaela, Sam’s love interest is the hot girl in school who dates the jock, but she also has an innate ability to fix cars. She has the looks and interests to make her a perfect match for Sam. Her full introduction, leaning seductively over the engine of the car with the sun glistening off her sweaty skin, is itself a glory shot of Megan Fox–straight out of a soda or beer commercial. Maggie is a similar male stereotype of what a woman should be. She’s a hot, nerdy woman; exceptionally smart. She speaks her mind and spends Act Three running around defending Hoover Dam from Decepticons all while wearing 4-inch heels. Hot! The final female is Judy, Sam’s mom–who along with dad Ron is there primarily for comedic effect. But she also plays into the adolescent fears of boyhood, specifically her questioning Sam’s “alone time” in his bedroom. It’s a question that Ron bristles at as well, proving that it’s also a fear for grown men as well. Let’s summarize by saying that the women in the film are about as real as cars transforming into robots.

Finally, government conspiracies take center stage. Conspiracies in and of themselves are a juvenile fiction that allows the believer to abstain from responsibilities due to the fact that there is some greater, hidden agenda in play, and thus out of their control. In this case, a Top Secret government group known as Sector Seven–which is unknown even to the Secretary of Defense. It operates with impunity and can even snatch young teens off the street and place them into black sites if they deem it necessary. They have operated in secret for over 80 years, hiding evidence of alien civilizations–not at that tourist attraction Area 51–but under the Hoover Dam. But like the Men in Black, they’re not wholly bad. Simmons, the leader as far as the audience can tell, does seem to have a change of heart when he realizes that the Autobots are the Good Guys!

The Science in The Fiction

The technology of the sentient, transforming machines is mentioned in one throw-away line from Maggie believing they might be “DNA-based computers.” And since this film is meant as a promotional vehicle (pun intended) for Hasbro’s toy line, there’s no further need for discussion. That leaves only one other technological aspect to dissect, The Cube. Also known as the All Spark to the Transformers, The Cube is a mythical construct that is said to have provided life to the planet Cybertron millennia ago. It is shown to have the power to take a piece of Earth technology, such as a Nokia flip phone, a Mountain Dew drink machine, or a Microsoft Xbox game system (all product placement), and imbue them with anthropomorphic attributes that give them sentience. Simmons also mentions that all of the major technological breakthroughs of the past Century are all thanks to experiments run on The Cube and NBE-One aka Megatron. “The microchip, lasers, spaceflight, cars, all reverse-engineered by studying him,” they claim, which belittles the true advancements that occurred but plays into the conspiracy themes of the film.

The Final Frontier

Interestingly there are still references–or at least an homage–to the defunct GI Joe film that producer Don Murphy wanted to make. The four main military characters, Lennox, Epps, Donnelly (Zack Ward), and Fig (Amaury Nolasco) each have elements of popular Joe’s. Lennox, the team leader, is modeled after the Joe’s leader Duke. Epps is based on either the ranger Stalker or possibly Roadblock–both black men, but Roadblock’s shaved head seems to fit Epps’ character a bit better. Donnely has some elements of his character (glasses, clumsy) based on the mine detector Trip Wire. While Fig’s lapses into Spanish and discussion of his momma’s home cookin’ are reminiscent of Gung Ho and his Cajun backstory.

Transformers is the best of the franchise (barring the original The Transformers: The Movie and Bumblebee films), but that is not setting the bar too high. Fatigue, both optical and mental, plays a large part in the film since there are few moments where audiences are allowed to catch their breath. The transformations of the robots, which should be the coolest part of the film, are obfuscated by Bay’s frenetic camerawork and stylistic choices. There is an audience for these types of films, or at least the producers continue to believe so, given the release of a new film every three years. Transformers still marks a turning point for science-fiction films which had finally found a foothold in the mainstream summer blockbusters. Unfortunately, these watered-down franchise films probably hurt the genre more than helped get fans excited.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading and following Sci-Fi Saturdays this year. It’s getting to be that time of the season when this series goes on a brief hiatus for the 31 Days of Horror, a daily series in October focusing on various horror films over the last hundred years. Stay tuned every day for a new horror article with Saturday being reserved for new sci-fi/horror reviews, including some truly terrifying tales. See you again in 30 days!

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