Transformers

Transformers is intermittently entertaining, but its clever machines cannot make 144 minutes of muddled action and thin comedy worth the time. Michael Bay is plainly interested in the business of cars becoming robots, and the film briefly settles whenever it lets that happen. He is much less interested in giving the humans something worth saying between demonstrations. We can enjoy an action film with a daft premise; the difficulty here is how often the spectacle stops being easy to follow.

The transformations justify some of the fuss. We were delighted by them, because the intricate movement makes these impossible machines look as though somebody has worked out how they fit together. There is pleasure in being able to follow a mechanical process even while knowing perfectly well that it cannot happen. Bay’s coordination of animation and live action is most effective here, and the elaborate sound gives the moving parts a convincing sense of weight.

Mitchell Amundsen’s cinematography gives the vehicles a polish that suits Bay’s fascination with them, and the car chases benefit from his attention. Jeff Mann’s production design gives the cars and military hardware a solid-looking world to occupy, and the robots fit convincingly into it. These are substantial achievements in a film where so much depends on accepting a robot as a physical presence. The trouble comes when Bay needs several of those presences to occupy the same action sequence.

Editors Tom Muldoon, Paul Rubell and Glen Scantlebury keep the action busy without consistently making its movement clear. Too often we can register impact but cannot follow who has struck whom, which wastes some of the detail that made the transformations so enjoyable. Steve Jablonsky’s score adds another layer of insistence to a soundtrack already crowded with machinery. The music keeps pressing for excitement when a little space to see and hear what is happening would serve the film better.

The screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman does not provide much relief. Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky and Megan Fox’s Mikaela Banes have to hold our attention between the machines’ appearances, yet neither character is written with enough care to make that an attractive prospect. Some comic lines work, but the effort of getting through the explanations keeps interrupting any easy rhythm. Bay repeatedly asks the actors to make weak material lively, then gives them more of it than the film needs.

An effects-led adventure does not need complicated psychology, but it does need a reason to stay with the humans when the effects stop. Bay has not found one strong enough, and the military and comic detours make the length harder to forgive. We would happily see the machinery in action again, preferably in a film prepared to let us see it properly. If the cars becoming robots are enough for an evening, allow plenty of patience for everything that comes between.