More Than Meets The Eye? Barely.

I'm going to assume that with Transformers 2: Even More Robotic Action--not the real title--premiering tomorrow, it is fairly safe to write about Michael Bay's first movie without spoiling too much, but just in case, you have been warned.

Where did the impulse to watch the movie come from? Presumably from my childhood, when I was absolutely fascinated with the Transformers, and to a lesser extent, the cheap knock-offs known as the GoBots. Cars and trains getting into accidents? Uncool. Cars and trains transforming into giant robots with guns and blowing everything up? Cool.

Maybe it was Sutro Tower In San Francisco, which totally looks like it ought to be a Transformer.

Or maybe it was the summer blockbuster fever combined with the San Francisco atmosphere that makes watching movies a good thing to do on foggy, wet Sunday afternoons. Revenge of the Fallen trailers are everywhere, and I think I want to watch it, just because. It's one of those 'just because' movies, like X-Men Origins: Wolverine as opposed to Star Trek. But this is another instance like Harry Potter; if you want to watch or read a sequel, you have to read what came before--it's like the 11th Commandment, or something like that.

So I rented Transformers the other night to take advantage of a special promotion where we have a week of unlimited movie rentals for a relatively small price. For a movie like this, it is the perfect scenario.

It was definitely entertaining enough, with some hints of mythology and lots of special effects. Childhood toys brought to life and fighting each other and blowing things up. Would have been worth seeing in the theater. But there were problems, too, which I think, to the discerning eye, will establish why the movie didn't win an Oscar (as far as I know):

1) Where the hell was Megatron? When I was a kid, it was Optimus Prime versus Megatron. In this movie, Megatron spends the first 75% of the movie as a giant ice cube, only to come out in time for the big showdown, a 'machina ex machina' as it were; the story should have been about the Decepticons versus the Autobots, not a whiny teenager in love with Megan Fox. It's supposed to be fiction, after all;

2) Not enough screen time for Tom Lenk--Andrew from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. He was an analyst brought in by the military to figure out the source of a cyber attack. I was thrilled to see him for a few minutes, and then he disappeared. This was part of a larger problem, where there were simply way too many characters introduced and then left to dry like a towel on a clothesline, with no real depth--Lenk, Josh Duhamel, that one guy, Jon Voight, that girl analyst, Bernie Mac; it just got too distracting trying to keep up with them all.

A part of that might be my problem, because I kept getting distracted and looking away from time to time, so maybe I missed some character development, but I think that my distraction, like a backhanded compliment, would be a backhanded excuse for this character clutter;

which leads us to 3) it was way too hard to tell which Transformer was doing what to whom and when during the battle scenes. Totally lost track of them, and it wasn't until I read the Wikipedia article later that I realized that Starscream got away. Sequel, anyone?

The Transformers never really came to life, not much. Their personalities seemed like cliched action one-liners grafted on to hunks of metal and guns.

Maybe, though, I'm just being bitter because it was live-action, not the cartoon that I remember from when I was five or six. Maybe I should have rented the cartoon movie too.

Maybe I'll rent that one tomorrow, because the Transformers ARE a lot of fun.