"Transformers" Strikes Chord With Stunningly Beautiful Megan Fox; Fails Like Moldy Cheese Otherwise

I just saw the first "Transformers" movie because I'm a sucker for Megan Fox's lovely face, but I have to say that Explosion Bay (my name for director, Michael Bay, whose movies tend to be two and a half hour explosions,) disappoints yet again. Oh sure, there are awesome effects, Autobots morphing, Decepticons . . . . deceiving . . . and tons of destruction and mayhem. But where the fuck is the plot? Hmm? Anyone?

Let's start from the beginning. Sam is played by Shia However-the-hell-his-name-is-pronounced. Sam scores an A- on some test which is the agreement he had with his Dad that would get him a new car. As it turns out, this new car is a clunker of an old car with a tendency to do things on its own.

Whatever. I'm just waiting for Megan Fox to come on the screen. (Well, not literally, but that would be fun to watch as well.)

So, Sam gets a black and yellow Camaro and drives it to the park where Mikaela (Megan Fox) is hanging with her boyfriend. Sam is now face-to-face with Mikaela's jock boyfriend, who wants to turn the nerd into hamburger. Mikaela stops anything from happening before Shia, er, Sam gets turned into nerd-meat.

Next, Mikaela is being talked down to by her boyfriend, so she leaves him. What follows is every nerdy guy's ultimate dream: Sam offers to drive Mikaela home, and she agrees. Cut to some awkwardness as the Camaro decides to take Sam and Mikaela to a lookout and cuts the engines.

Okay. Now all of this would be interesting to me if I gave a shit about Sam, which I don't. He's portrayed as a guy with desperate needs. AND he's a nerd. A needy nerd is not an interesting character in my book. But, I'm hoping for Mikaela (the aforementioned Megan Fox) to sex up the screen and that keeps me watching.

As this is going on, a US military base in New Mexico . . . err, um, I mean, "Qatar" (wink wink) is attacked by shape-shifting robots that cannot be stopped. These things are pissed and they seem to want to kill everything in sight. That is, until some midget robot starts downloading data from the military's computers.

Cut back to Sam, where he finds out that his own car can drive itself. Sam tails his own car to a remote location where he watches his car "transform" (Get it? The name of the movie?) into a robot so it can shine the Bat-Signal, or Hasbro's Transformers logo up into the clouds above him. Lame.

Anyway, Sam is suddenly attacked by another robot who had morphed into a police car and demands to know where some cube might be hidden. Cut to big battle chase scenes with crashes and precious shots of Sam screaming, dodging, sliding, and cowering. Sam's yellow Camaro comes to the rescue, as does several other robots, led by one robot who clearly won the Coolest Name in the Universe contest: Optimus Prime.

Optimus tells Sam about the cube, about how Sam's own grandfather discovered a frozen robot named Megatron in the Arctic Circle, and that Sam's grandfather also discovered the location of this precious cube. Now, I've seen the movie and I still don't know what this cube is for, other than the bad guys want it, the good guys want it, and Optimus Prime vows to destroy it no matter the cost. (The classic "I-Don't-Give-a-Shit" Quest.)

At this point, there is far less Megan Fox than I would have liked. She actually tags along after Sam when he's running away from the Decepticon cop car. Why she suddenly decides to ditch her friends and follow Sam is never made clear, but who cares when Megan Fox is on the screen again? Not me, I assure you.

So, the gist of the plot is this: The good guys are Autobots. The bad guys are Decepticons. They both want this cube thingy from their home planet of "I was so bored I forgot the name of their stupid planet." Why they want it, I don't know. What it does, I have no clue. And Sam is crucial to the story, why? Because when his grandfather discovered the frozen Megatron, the man was struck by a beam that imprinted Megatron's location on the grandfather's glasses. How the Autobots knew that is beyond me. We're just simply supposed to nod and wait for more Megan Fox.

Moron Quest #1? Find Sam's grand dad's old glasses. Cue some silly bits about the Autobots stepping on the lawn of Sam's parents' house, and hiding under a patio roof to avoid detection from Sam's parents, and you get an idea of the ridiculousness of this movie. Anyway, glasses are found, and then suddenly, Sam and Mikaela are arrested, and the Camaro, heretofore known as "Bumblebee," is captured.

I'm even skipping over the whole Secretary of Defense and his gaggle of investogators, but I don't mind because it's a stupid subplot.

At any rate, Sam and Mikaela find themselves being shown super-duper-secret stuff hidden near Hoover Dam to hide these things from . . . who knows what? Apparently, when Sam's grandpappy found Megatron, the US Government's super-duper-secret agency that no one knows about took a frozen Megatron and the big, bad voodoo cube, and dropped them into this underground facility. As we are told, every piece of modern electronic or computer technology on Earth is due to the reverse engineering of Megatron. Mmm hmm. Now if only they reverse engineered this plot. They'd come up with the basic plot of a Thomas the Tank Engine show.

Okay. So, they've found the glasses, and they've found the cube. What's next? Well, we see a frozen Megatron. Wouldn't it be cool if something happened to thaw him out? You don't think so either? We'll, neither did I, but they did it anyway.

Bumblebee touches the Cube and it shrinks from the size of a three story building to the size of a square football. Megatron is thawed, and once again, mayhem ensues.

As Sam and his buddies try to drive away with the Cube to nowhere in particular when the Decepticons attack, and much mayhem ensues. Buildings are rattled and crumble, humans are flicked away, people run in vain, and Sam is given the duty of running to a rooftop to, what? Hand the Cube over to Black Hawk helicopters? Give me a break.

I don't even remember how it ended. All I know is that Megan Fox kisses that dweeby Shia kid at the end, and my stomach started turning. It made no sense. Where was the attraction? Where was the romance? Where was the . . . Oh yeah. That's right. It's not there. We're only supposed to imagine it's there.

"Transformers" is an Explosion Bay production, so it's pretty much a given fact that the movie will have no discernible plot. But I was even surprised to learn that Megan Fox added very little sex appeal to the movie. The CG effects were great, but so what? I didn't care about these people any more than I cared about whether California is a blue state or a red state. (In fact, I don't know which is which.)

So, two hours have been wasted for which I will complain about for many months until Mr. Explosion Bay gives me back the money I spent on the 2-disc DVD piece of shit.

Grrrrrrrrrr.

~Out