Love transformed

What I was saying the other day?

"Transformers?

"Awesome."

I wasn't kidding.

If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.  If you haven't, don't take my word for it.  Chew on this.  Back in June, when Optimus Prime and his friends hit the cineplexes, I was terrified I'd draw the short straw and wind up being the one who had to take the Mannion boys to see it.  The blonde was just as worried on her own behalf.  But then Old Mother and Father Blonde stepped in.  They volunteered to take the boys.  I thought this was above and beyond and tried to talk them into taking them to Ratatouille instead.  But you're saving that one for the drive-in on Cape Cod, said Mother Blonde. They won't mind seeing it again, I said.  No, said Father Blonde, we'll make the sacrifice.  I'll bring my earplugs.  We'll survive.

They took them.  The survived.  They enjoyed it!

It's a good movie, they said.

And they were right.  We watched it for family movie night last week.  It is a good movie, for what it is, a simple aliens invade the earth and blow things up action-adventure tale.

A lot more fun than Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds, that's for sure.  And Shia LaBeouf is a much more bearable action adventure hero than Cruise.  Cruise always seems to be trying too hard when he plays an action-adventure hero, as if he thinks he has to prove something.  In Transformers, LaBeouf takes a much more relaxed approach to his character, as relaxed as any character can be who's being hunted by giant robots from outer space.

As Sam Witwicky, LaBeouf is good at the derring-do, good with the throwaway quip---he has a great sense of humor---and he's good at playing a character who is, although smart, brave, and desperate enough not to give a damn, still in way over his head and knows it and who is frantically making it up as he goes along.  In other words, he shows why he's a fine choice to play the son of Indiana Jones and Marian Ravenwood in the next Indy movie.

He doesn't show why he's one of the best young actors working today.  You have to watch The Greatest Game Ever Played to get a sense of what he can do that way.

The question for the future is will Hollywood force on him a career that's a little too much like Harrison Ford's or will he be allowed to become what he seems best suited to become, his generation's Jimmy Stewart, whose shoes he has already walked around in a little bit, sort of.

At any rate, not only is he good, the whole human cast of main characters does a nice job.  All the important human characters are interesting and appealing, just enough so that their stories don't get in the way of the plot and the action.  That includes Jon Voight as the Secretary of Defense, Josh Duhamel as the Army Special Ops officer who has Sam's back, and John Turturro as a cynical and full of himself government agent who turns out to be the kind of guy you want on your side when the chips are down.  This is important because the Transformers themselves are short on charisma.

That's my review.  Fun movie, good cast.  Nothing deeper than that needs saying.  But you know I'm not going to stop there, right?

The movie has a love interest.  Of course it does.  And she's one of the reasons back in the spring I cringed at the thought of having to go to the movie.  I cringed the other night when she first appeared on screen.  Her name is Mikaela and she is played by the Playboy Playmate gorgeous and unfortunately surnamed Megan Fox, and when I saw her in the trailers and then again in her early scenes I was dismayed.

Great, I thought, another movie in which a nice guy geek pines after and then wins the heart of the school princess.

This is an old, old story, as old as Aladdin and Jack and the Beanstalk, the story of the poor boy who through luck, pluck, and decency wins the hand of a lady-fair far beyond his initial reach or apparent deserving.

In the old stories the boy did this by changing.  He became a hero and a prince through his great deeds.

In its current version (see the movies of Judd Apatow and his imitators and most TV shows that revolve around teenage love and lust), it's the princess who changes.  She learns to see that the poor boy is deserving in and of himself.  Nice guy geeks just make better lovers.

At first glance, this is what I expected to happen in Transformers.

But it turns out that with Sam and Mikaela there's more than meets the eye.

Sam is not a nice guy geek.  He is a smart, resourceful, competent young man who, because he is still so very young, hasn't figured out yet how best to present himself to the world.  This makes him awkward, but it doesn't make him any less smart, resourceful, or competent.  This is all to say that he is already something of a hero and a prince and when he's looking around for his princess and his eye and heart settle on Mikaela he has reasons not to expect her response to be, In your dreams!

He's not dreaming, and because he's not Sam and Mikaela's little love story (which I should point out is never given so much attention that it gets in the way of the main plot; the action never stops just so they can smooch) is not a nice guy geek's daydream.

This has a lot to due with Sam's being played by Shia LaBeouf.  But it's also there in the script.  Somebody, probably director Michael Bay, since he's something of a control freak, decided that there wasn't time for Sam to be a human version of a Transformer, a beat-up 1974 Camaro who reveals his secret identity as a weapon of destruction when the bad guys attack.  He needed to be a young hero from the start.

But there's even more to it than that, because of what the concept requires Mikaela to be.

Every important human character, including Sam's goofy parents, plays a role in helping Sam and Optimus Prime defeat Megatron, including Mikaela.  Which means she's not there just to admire Sam.  She's got work of her own to do, work she's able to do because she turns out not to be the princess I took her for.

She's first seen hanging with the popular crowd at her and Sam's high school, but she's not really one of them.  Sam is what he is already.  She's the one with the secret identity.  She's the transformer.

Mikaela, it turns out, is a working class kid whose incredible good looks allow her to pass as a princess.  But once the action gets going and her hair gets mussed and her make-up runs, she starts to look like what she is, one of those slightly hard-edged working class girls whose beauty is a mixed blessing---it gives them advantages that allow them to rise in the world, but only in certain and limited directions, and it often brings them the wrong kind of attention.

Among the popular kids, especially the boys, Mikaela is only granted membership as long as she's content to be a beautiful trophy.

This is in fact how Sam first sees her and it's why she doesn't like him right away.  She knows why he wants her, it's the same reason her jock boyfriend wants her, as a prize.  The difference is that Sam can't give her what the popular kids are giving her, a disguise to wear.

Mikaela isn't just a scullery maid passing as a princess.  She's the daughter of a criminal.  Her father's a car thief who used to take her along when he went out to steal cars, and when he got caught, she got caught.  She's a convicted thief herself.

This means that her and Sam's story isn't a re-telling of Aladdin.  It's a re-telling of Cinderella.

Mikaela doesn't prove she's a natural born princess by leaving behind a glass slipper, though.  She proves it by driving a big honking tow truck right into the thick of the last battle with Megatron and helping to save the day.

She's able to do this because her car thief dad taught her everything he knows about cars.  How to break into them, how to start them without a key, how to strip them down, how to fix them, and how to drive them very fast.

She's a motorhead, and since Sam is something of a motorhead himself, she's a girl after his own heart.

And it's only as her past is revealed to him and he's forced to see her as herself and not as projection of his own vanity that they can actually begin to like each other.

(It's a sign of what a well-crafted movie this is that they do this while missiles are flying and giant alien robots are trying to kill them and the action never misses a beat while they're at it.)

At the end of the day, then, Sam and Mikaela come together because they have things in common.

This isn't a big deal within the movie itself.  It's just one of a number of intelligent decisions the filmmakers made.  It's a big deal, though, when you put Transformers into a line-up of other movies and TV shows in which the nice guy geek wins the princess is the story of the love story.

It's telling a generation of young men who apparently need telling that they shouldn't be flattering themselves that they deserve to be loved by princesses just because they're such nice guys.  It's telling them that when it comes to girls there is more than meets the eye and they should look around for people with whom they share interests.  It's telling them that there has to be more than meets the eye about themselves.  Nobody is going to love you because you "deserve" to be loved.

When the story's over and Sam and Mikaela are alone together they will have things to talk about.  Unlike the run of the mill nice guy geek wins the cheerleader story, Sam and Mikaela will have more to do together than sit around and admire what a nice guy the nice guy geek has turned out to be.

They will have real things to say to each other, like, "Sweety pie, hand me that three inch bit."

Credit where credit is due update:  In the comments, SAP reminds me that blog roll favorite, John Rogers, of Kung Fu Monkey, worked on the screenplay, so unless John himself comes along to tell me otherwise, I'm just going to assume that all the stuff I liked about the story is his doing.

Your turn:  What's your favorite action-adventure movie?

Also, little while back, Carrie Rickey, film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was looking for readers' thoughts on which young actors today are likely to become the big stars of the future.  Shia LaBeouf is at the top of her list.  Who's on yours?

Transformers and most of the movies I've reviewed are available on DVD through my aStore.  Please help support this blog by buying stuff you don't really need.

Comments

[Stu]

That may be true, but _Transformers_ is still a crappy movie with horribly drawn stock characters in the place of robots, an obsession with military hardware, the belief that we'd rather watch humans fight than robots most of the time, and the belief that it is really funny when in fact it is annoying (see "Mac, Bernie - 10 minute scene," for instance).

[SAP]

Interesting, Mr. Mannion.

I didn't see the movie when it came out in the theaters, primarily because it was directed by Michael Bay. And I have to say that, having finally seen it on DVD, it was better than I gave it credit for being. Still not all that good, but better than I thought.

Then again, I'm just going to assume that the good parts (like Sam and Mikaela's relationship) were written by John Rogers and call it a day.

[Mike the Mad Biologist]

What's your favorite action-adventure movie?

The Replacement Killers. Despite taking place in a surreal Chinatown, it's basically a western. It also has no wasted scenes, and Chow-Yun Fat and Sorino have superb chemistry.

[tweez]

My favorite action-adventure movie of all time has to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. I fell in love with Karen Allen in that movie.

[David]

I'd have to agree that Raiders is probably my favorite action-adventure movie. In fact, when someone defends the latest loud, mindless, crapfest by calling it a "popcorn movie" I point to Raiders as evidence that popcorn movies don't have to suck, and that being a popcorn movie is no excuse for sucking.

[ChaChaBowl]

Went with the wife to see "Dan in Real Life" today; her choice this time, mine was "3:10 to Yuma" the last movie night.

It was a smart, funny, bittersweet movie about grownups, but what was weird about the evening was seeing a music video about the National Guard among the mix of coming attractions and infotainment before the movie started.

The music video was by 3 Doors Down, and was slickly done, with shots of the band mixed between recreated scenes of the Guard in a variety of locations and historic periods. The weirdest scene had a group of ragtag Americans in tricorner hats shooting from the woods at redcoated British troops that were out in the open; and the immediate thought I had was OH MY GOD, WE ARE THE INSURGENTS.

Anyway, I don't think the Guard was served well by this music video, as it implied that being in desert gear with a semiautomatic rifle in your hand is what happens when you sign up to serve two weeks a year for your community. Nor did it explain that if you're wounded, you ain't covered by the VA when you get home.

I used to think of the Guard as rescuers, not aggressors, people that fought fires and helped out in disasters. Now, they've been turned into an under-equipped, under-trained auxiliary of weekend warriors sent to do the dirty work for a dirty administration. These men and women deserve better than the deal they were dealt by the Bushies.

[Ken Houghton]

Walgreen's!

Indy frere shouldn't need no stinkin' Walgreen's.