A transforming toy story

'Transformers' bears the hallmarks of its executive producer, Steven Spielberg. The robotic story feels more human as a result.

By Peter Rainer | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 6, 2007 edition

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I didn't grow up playing with Hasbro's Transformer action toys, and now that I've seen "Transformers," I'm not about to start. The movie itself is actually one great big action toy.

Transformer toy fanatics – who make Trekkies seem docile by comparison – have been all over the Web in the past year anticipating horrendous changes to their prized folklore. My guess is that they'll see this film and somehow survive.

The movie began as the brainchild of its executive producer, Steven Spielberg, who has said, "I've been one of the biggest fans of 'The Transformers.' I'm not talking about buying the toys for my kids. I'm talking about reading the comic books and buying the toys for myself."

Although Michael Bay directed the film, the entire enterprise has a Spielbergian veneer, especially its core story about average-guy 11th-grader Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), whose first car, a yellow Camaro, turns out to be a shape-shifting alien Autobot – a good robot. The contest between adolescent innocence and nefariousness of the adult world, as embodied here by the bad bot Decepticons who rain terror on Earth, is a Spielberg perennial.

But Bay is a much more ham-handed director than Spielberg and vast sections of the movie, especially toward the end, are all about hardware clanking against hardware.

The Decepticons and the Autobots, who ravaged their planet, Cybertron, in a civil war, are duking it out for possession of an all-powerful cube called Allspark, which crash-landed in the Arctic generations ago when Sam's great-grandfather came in contact with it. His eyeglasses, which the boy keeps as an heirloom, hold the key to locating Allspark.

All this fantasyland hoo-ha is balanced by scenes in which the Decepticons attack an American military base in Qatar and are mistaken for terrorists. Although clearly played for thrills, it's difficult to watch these scenes without thinking that the real world has crept into the playpen. And when Optimus Prime, the chief good Transformer, declares that "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," we know we're in a Bush-era universe.

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