Transformers

In the early going of their career, Metallica recorded a song called “Trapped Under Ice.” The band’s front man, at the time a brash twenty-two year old rising rock star, noted that “it’s not a song about the existential condition of the human soul. It’s about a guy trapped under ice.”

That same glib sentiment is just about the only way to wrap one’s awed eyeballs and ringing ears around the empty spectacle that is Transformers. There is no subtext about the blurred line between humanity and technology, nor any existential meditations on the human soul. It’s about giant robots that shoot rockets at each other and then turn into sweet cars. That’s all, and nothing more; making it a masterfully orchestrated symphony of noise, pulled together by one of the most talented directors in Hollywood, that communicates absolutely nothing.

There is a plot in Transformers, but as with most summer action movies, it’s been sun-baked into a faded, generic wafer. There are good robots and evil robots, all from the unimaginatively named planet “Cybertron.” They are chasing after a cube-shaped battery called “the All-Spark” which, as the screenwriter’s luck would have it, can only be found with the help from a dorky teenager with a crush on the hottest girl in school.

It’s implausible, but so are most movies, but the paper-thin storyline is not the main problem here. Great drama has been implausible since long before Oedipus Rex was a rehearsing in a Greek amphitheater. Storytelling is the art of bringing the implausible to life and that is where Transformers fails and the Michael Bay paradox begins. His feature films are full of astonishing special effects and iconic imagery that are exhilarating and completely empty at the same time.

It’s like listening to a world-class musician who will only perform Britney Spears songs. Bay is a masterful craftsman who doesn’t have a thing to say. The backbone of all his films is a simplistic, upright Boy Scout morality and a deep, abiding sense of patriotism. Both concepts lend themselves best to easy, primary-colored imagery. The good guys win, the bad guys get punished, and lots of things get blown to pieces in the process. Complex moral shadings and emotional growth aren’t even on his radar.

Much of Bay’s style is rooted in his work directing commercials. He first made his mark with a wide array of commercials, most notably the memorable “Aaron Burr” commercial for the “Got Milk?” campaign. In a commercial, a director has thirty seconds or less to get across as much information as is humanly perceivable. Every image has to land with a maximum of impact and be comprehensible with a minimum of thought. There’s no time or breathing room to allow ideas to breathe and grow.

On a shot-by-shot basis, Transformers has some of the most visceral imagery that movie screens have shown all year. The capture of the yellow Autobot, Bumblebee, where he gets helplessly dragged down like a wild animal evokes powerful, almost painful emotions. The snapping steel cables and black-helmeted government agents summon up the capture of Kong, the sacrifice of Aslan, and countless echoes of historical cruelty. In those moments the film feels like it has plugged directly into your subconscious mind and forced an emotional response. But those moments fade with the next scene change. The storytelling has done nothing to earn any kind of lasting or sustained emotional response, and the ferocity with which emotions are jerked out of the audience borders on the assaultive or the sadistic. Those thirty seconds might make the greatest public service announcement against man-on-robot violence ever, but in context, it flashes by like a commercial in the middle of a half- watched football game.

Subverting the cerebral cortex is not the same thing as generating real emotion. Storytelling in feature films demands long and graceful arcs, not the instantaneous spasms that comprise television commercials. All of the human beings throughout Transformers broadcast the signals for a narrow spectrum of emotions – fear, joy, pride, anger – clumsily shifting gears as the next wisecrack or explosion dictates. The whole film flickers by in a succession of static moments, and no single emotion is ever allowed to expand and develop organically until it becomes something new. Instead there is just a forced march of carefully machined sales pitches. The ultimate effect is almost dehumanizing, which is the height of irony in a film about machines assuming human form and embodying the extremes of our nature.