Technology Transformed

For the second anniversary of my 40th birthday today I decided to wallow in my inner child and took in the rock 'em 'sock 'em Megatron-megahit Transformers. I left the movie astonished, and a little depressed.

It's not a very good movie. No Michael Bay picture can be. He has something of an eye (which puts this a notch above the raggedly produced and photographed Live Free or Die Hard) but precious little heart, and a cauliflower ear for dialogue. And no sense of humor, or a taste for humor that is obvious, vulgar, and unfunny (what will parents make of a scene in this kids' film where Tony-winner Julie White, as Shia LaBeouf's space-cadet mother, quizzes him if he's masturbating as the robots surround their house?). There is also, as in many of his films, a distasteful, free-floating jingoism. I don't mind that the robots are fighting--hell, it's what I came to see!--but the jarhead-jargon combat scenes in Qatar, where the warring Autobots and Decepticons first turn up, seem suspiciously like they're priming the small fry for the next decade's Mideast Wars of Liberation or something. I had a nostalgic good time watching the TCM special Spielberg on Spielberg, where many of the director's best clips are shown, but it's a shame that producer Spielberg is in bed professionally with such a talentless pretender-to-the-throne as Bay.

But that's not why I left the theater feeling deflated. It was my birthday, I was jonesing for popcorn and cherry Coke, and I wanted to see giant robots pound the crap out of downtown L.A. In fact, I wanted to see them pound the crap out of all of L.A.--who wouldn't? (I was glad that a rep house showing A Place in the Sun and The Rose Tattoo was largely spared from the mayhem, as if Bay has ever seen either of these films, or learned anything from them.) I wished the robots wouldn't have talked but while doing it (Hugo Weaving and Robert Foxworth are among the vox robotuli) but I guess it's that way in the cartoon, which I've never seen. I trust the appealing LaBeouf will star in a real movie that will test his affability. I hope Jon Voight and John Turturro give some of their paychecks to Easter Seals or Goodwill or some other charitable undertaking. And I won't be seeing the sequels. Probably.

But, no, the reason I felt kind of sad after it ended--other than the fact that I was by far the oldest unaccompanied adult there--was that the robots are pure cinematic perfection. They are as real as any special effect ever seen. They share the same plane with the actors, seamlessly. Jurassic Park got the digital ball rolling, and Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies and the new King Kong ran with it, but this is it. Flesh and fantasy are now one. It helps, maybe, that the transformers are machines, with no irksome fur or skin to replicate. But here we are. They are as real as any human up there, and interact with them without a trace of difference. I can just imagine them showing up on set, putting in their union-mandated hours, then morphing back into toasters or nosehair clippers or whatever till the next day's shooting. (Speaking of which, why can't the captured transformer just downsize into a Matchbox car and scoot away from his tormentors?)

And that saddened me. All that wizardry leaves no room for dreaming. Jurassic Park was completely satisfying; I love dinosaurs, and dinosaur movies, and there at last were real dinosaurs up there on the screen. I might be disappointed if I were to meet an actual T-Rex but that's unlikely to happen. Gollum had to convince if two-thirds of the Rings films were to succeed, and he did, splendidly. Kong was more problematic. The Weta Digital crew made him as real a giant ape as possible, a tremendous achievement but a limiting one--he no longer passed muster as a fantasy creature, or a monster. He was a giant gorilla, cut down to size. Too real.

And so it is with the transformers. In the quantum leap forward from Peter Jackson's universe, movie magic has rendered the fantastic completely mundane. I liked having that little sliver of incredulity intact, the divide between fact and fantasy preserved. Ray Harryhausen's beautifully articulated beasts, in pictures like Jason and the Argonauts, may have been a little arthritic in their articulation compared to today's computer-animated creatures, but they were wonderfully handmade and tactile. You cared about them when the show was on and thought about them long after the movie ended. The in-the-lab professionalism behind Transformers, by contrast, leaves me feeling cold. The possibility for imagining has been taken right out of the equation, and I will miss it. It would have to be Michael Bay's fault.