Transformers (review)

It all began with Barbie dolls and Gene Rodenberry. In 1964, noting Mattel's success with the former (launched in 1959), Hasbro unveiled GI Joe, a line of dolls for boys, partly inspired by and partly tie-in merchandise for a Rodenberry-produced television series, The Lieutenant (US 1963–1964). In Japan, Takara's success with Combat Joe, licensed from Hasbro, led them to develop another line of dolls, launched in 1972, called Henshin Cyborg, which featured internal 'atomic power units' and 'cybernetic systems'. A spin-off line called Microman, released in the US as Micronauts, featured (smaller and less expensive to produce) robots who 'disguised themselves as toys'. Their component parts were interchangeable, and some of them could be shapeshifted into vehicles. In 1984, Hasbro bought the rights to the latter variety, combined them with another line of Japanese toys (Takara's Diaclone, which featured human-piloted robots and vehicles, including Car-Robots) and brought in Marvel Comics to help produce a narrative universe for their new line of robots in disguise: Transformers. There followed toys, comics, a television cartoon series (US/Japan 1984–1987), The Transformers: The Movie (Shin US/Japan 1986), more toys, more comics, more cartoon series (the Beast Wars spin-offs (Canada 1996–1999 and Japan 1998–1999), and Robots in Disguise (Japan 2001), some novels and video games, some crossovers with the American GI Joe and British Action Force comics, three seasons of Japanese/American co-produced cartoons (2002–2006), more toys, more comics…

Alternatively, according to the opening narration of Michael Bay's live-action blockbuster rendition, it all began on the planet Cybertron, devastated by a war between two kinds of giant, metamorphic robot: the Decepticons, who are evil because they look that way, and the Autobots, who are not evil because they do not (and when they get to Earth, they transform into down-home, good ol' boy muscle cars, semis and monster trucks). The Decepticons are led by the genocidal Megatron, the Autobots by the pompous Optimus Prime. During the war, something called the Allspark (or The Cube) was lost. Its exact nature and purpose are unclear, but as the Decepticons and Autobots have been searching the galaxy for it ever since, and because you can hear the capital letters when characters say its name, it must be really important. It is, of course, on Earth.

In the 1930s, The Cube was discovered on the border between Arizona and Nevada, prompting President Hoover to order the construction of a giant dam on the Colorado River in which to conceal it. Three decades earlier, in either 1897 or 1895 (the film gives both dates), polar explorer Captain Archibald Wit-wicky (William Morgan Sheppard) accidentally discovered Megatron, frozen beneath the arctic ice. Although we are told nothing about what happened to the evil giant robot in the intervening decades, the US government (somehow) transported Megatron to the under-construction Hoover Dam, where it has been kept in 'cryo-stasis' (somehow) and plundered (somehow) for a range of reverse-engineered technologies. But most of this backstory comes later. Once the introductory narration about the Transformer war and The Cube is over, the film starts in Qatar (which, despite never exceeding 300 feet above sea level, surprisingly seems to have mountains), with an attack on a US military base by a Decepticon intent on infiltrating US defence systems. Only a handful of soldiers (who cannot decide whether to wear army or airforce uniforms) escape, led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel), a character from the GI Joe vs The Transformers comic series (2003– ). The film also starts in suburbs in either Nevada or California (depending on whether one pays attention to geographical clues or licence plates), with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), the explorer's hapless great-great-grandson (or great-grandson – the film loses count). He is desperate to get a car so he can get a girl, specifically Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox). He ends up buying a battered, yellow-and-black Camaro: Bumblebee, an Autobot-in-disguise who has...