Friday, August 12, 2011

On Transformers, part 2

“Oh, If only my life was more like 1983
All these things would be more like they were at the start of me
Had it made in ‘83…
...You can paint the house a rainbow of colours
Rip out the floorboards, replace the shutters
But that’s my plastic in the dirt...”
~83’, by John Mayer
from his album “Room For Squares”, 2001
Last week I wrote about the three Transformers films directed by Michael Bay and produced by Steven Spielberg, those being Transformers (2007), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011).  I’ve got more to say, and in the very best of fanboy tradition, I’m prefacing what follows with an overly dramatic SPOILER ALERT!!, that is to say, I may reveal plot points and character arcs that you may not want to know if you haven’t seen the films already.  If you’ve never seen a SPOILER ALERT!! before, you need to trust me; it’s the done thing.
So…  SPOILER ALERT!!  SPOILER ALERT!! SPOILER ALERT!! 
My father still has a laminated placemat that I drew in 1986, at age nine or ten, depicting a Transformers battle scene between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons.  I loved the cartoon from its early days in 1984 and the animated movie in the heady days of 1986.  It was a much simpler time.  I collected the toys and had some beauties too.  If only I had a clue about their eventual worth (not just financial) back then, I wouldn’t have carelessly disposed of them as I did sometime in the late 1980’s, an action I regret more than I can say.  The movies brought me back into that world and it’s grand mythologies.  I now belong in a strange space between worlds - to most of my friends I have an interest that is strong enough to be likened to obsession, but within the fan community, I would not be considered to be very serious at all.  My interest is well within the realms of hobby, rather than the driving force of obsession.  Nevertheless, the lore of Transformers is one that resonates with me and I will certainly admit to a large degree of affection for its stories and traditions.
I was initially wary of Bay’s choice to depict the characters that form the basis of the Transformers universe as extremely complex pieces of machinery, far more so than any other iteration of the same characters.  Many segments of Transformers fandom have rejected the look of the characters, pejoratively terming them (and the many, many toys they inspire) ‘Bayformers’, characterised by less blocky forms than the more traditional depictions and often featuring complex transformation sequences.  These designs did eventually grow on me, even though I would have much preferred Ironhide to be red instead of black, and Ratchet to be his more traditional white and red instead of a lurid yellow-green.  The flames that Optimus Prime sport in his vehicular mode were the subject of much internet angst, too.  These choices may be explained by the fact that large tracts of red tend to photograph poorly, hence the designs needed revising for practical reasons.  This does not, however, explain the perfectly clear presence of the red Ferrari car mode of Dino (more on him next week) in T:DOTM.
The same excuses can not be made for things like Decepticon leader Megatron’s look, which makes him appear as though his head has half-swallowed his face.  Most all of the robots have odd-looking faces, with Optimus Prime sporting a very cool look until his traditional mouthguard disappears to make way for something far more simian.  I do suppose it is somewhat fitting, as the characters are, after all, aliens.
Those designs represented a risk taken by the filmmakers, in that they risked alienating a large enough segment of the loyal fan base in the early days of the film’s development (via the inevitable leaks of photos and footage from the set, as well as the teasers, trailers, posters and other promotional material). If the fans were turned off, the filmmakers may then have had to potentially rely too heavily on casual film-goers to make a financial success of the film.  The studio no doubt intended Transformers to be a tent-pole, blockbuster summer release and potential franchise starter. One would have to admit the designs were a popular success by virtue of the fact that Bay’s vision of characters such as the popular Autobot Bumblebee have taken its place in pop-culture consciousness as the more-or-less definitive versions of the characters, at least for the time being.  That may seem a big statement, but if you disagree, I challenge you to try and find a Transformers lunch box without Bay’s Bumblebee on it at K-Mart.
I would have liked to have seen more characters from my youth realised on the screen, but sadly, the robot rosters are slim, particularly in the first film.  I can understand that a larger cast represented a larger budget in CGI effects which perhaps couldn’t be justified by Bay, but it is perplexing that they still referred to the struggles between the good and bad characters as a war in the initial promotional material (the tagline “Our World. Their War.” appeared in some posters).  It was far more like a fight between two small gangs than a war.
Last week I discussed the merits of Michael Bay as a visual director, and that his storytelling style is a good fit for the subject matter.  Unfortunately, like much of Hollywood, Bay does not have the same grasp of story and character and is not nearly as interested in the finer details of his scripts as he is in his camera angles, shot selection and special effects. In the first film, a plan to prevent the evil Decepticons from capturing the powerful and life-giving Allspark Cube, the human military characters decide the best course of action is to take the cube away from a relatively remote location and into the middle of a city full of people.  To ‘hide’ it from the huge, destructive, evil creatures who are happy to destroy anything in their path to get at it.  Was there ever a denser or sillier plot device?  I get the reasoning behind it; a battle between giant robots in the middle of a bustling city is appealing on a visceral level, but surely the script writers could have thought of a logical and intelligent way of getting them there?
As I said last week, there is an inherent inconsistency with expecting a movie based on a line of toys to be exceedingly nuanced.  Bay was reportedly hamstrung while making T:ROTF due to the Writers Guild of America’s strike between November 2007 and February 2008, at which time the shooting script for the first sequel was only one draft old. It was in desperate need of serious revision by writers who were unable (and rightly unwilling) to work on it.  Bay shot the script as it was, and the film was a mess.  I’ve written enough first drafts to know they almost always stink.  The movies also seem to lack a cohesion between them; while the level of threat reaches a dramatic climax in T:DOTM’s last hour (the invasion, destruction of and fight for Chicago is clearly the best 60 minutes of the franchise), the character’s motivations to possess and control the various McGuffins (the Allspark Cube, the Matrix of Leadership, and the Space Bridge respectively) don’t always make sense and hence the overarching Transformers movie mythology lacks a certain consistency.  More’s the pity.
There are deeper problems with the movies than mere quibbles, but that’s a discussion for next week, where we will conclude.
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