Boys with Toys: Transformers: Dark of the Moon vs. The Fast and the Furious
Too easy! By chance I see two movies with so many similarities that it’s almost not fair to contrast them. One movie features a barely adult man-child, hounded by the government, who is obsessed with big, fast, flashy machines that only a tiny elite know much about. The other movie has Vin Diesel in it.
I usually like to compare random movies because it’s interesting to see if common themes or ideas pop up. Sadly, I think I’ll have to assess the storytelling and character development in these films...which is challenge enough, I suppose.
Ok. In the latest installment of the Transformers train-wreck franchise, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) again pops up to save the world simply by dint of his knowing Optimus Prime et al. This time, he’s got a new hottie girlfriend named Carly (Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). What about the featureless Sam attracts hot, successful, supremely confident women like Carly? We’ll never know, since neither the script nor the stars’ “chemistry” can offer explanations. So, wish fulfillment by screen story nerds. Whatever. Sam’s relationship with this hottie is unbelievable, but even more so is his artificial predicament of unemployment. This guy has classified knowledge on alien technology and civilization, not to mention the fact that he knows Optimus Prime and probably has pay dirt on a dozen elected officials. I thought government bloat existed to find jobs for this kind of guy. The CIA couldn’t hook him up with a project manager position? You’d think they would want to keep an eye on him. But, again, whatever.
Like the previous Transformers movies, this one involves a devious Decepticon plot, this time to have post-apocalypse Cybertron teleported next door to Earth so the Decepticons can exploit all the Earth’s natural resources by force. Sounds like the D-cons went to B-school. The Autobots still haven’t twigged to the fact that the Decepticons are tricky bastards (it’s right there in the name, people!), so they spend most of the movie getting outmaneuvered and stomped on, until the last climactic battle, which takes nearly an hour of screen time and nearly destroys Chicago. The same battle scene also features a nerdy, skinny Sam and a stiletto-heeled, skinny Carly running gamely along into an apocalyptic battle with Navy-frickin-SEALs. You know, the guys they call when we need to take down evil overlords or sneak onto battleships through eel-infested waters. Carly doesn’t even lose a shoe. I call BS...unless that’s Victoria’s Secret’s secret! The models are all crack mercenary troops. Ooh, I have a movie idea!
The plot of the Transformers:DotM is just as dumb as the first two movies, but the script is slightly less schizophrenic -- the first movie, especially, lurched between a story appropriate for 13-year-olds and one intended for 30-somethings. But character development is still a foreign concept. We know nothing more about Sam at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning. He’s a blank slate, a plot device to explain the Autobots connection to humanity. Carly, too, is blandly hot and personality-free throughout, and the rest of the movie is glutted with a huge cast of characters so unimportant they aren’t even named. They merely exist for a scene or two as Sam and the Bots pass through. The only exceptions are the characters played by better-known (and better) actors so bat-shit crazy that they can force some life into their roles, although the only trait they were allowed to show, apparently, is that of being bat-shit crazy. These actors are, in order of appearance: John Malkovich (crazy boss), Ken Jeong (crazy conspiracy theory co-worker), John Turturro (crazy ex-CIA), and Alan Tudyk (crazy assistant to crazy ex-CIA). Their scenes are not painful to watch, an accomplishment for which each one is to be commended.
So that was a movie which contained immature man-children obsessed with cars that were more than meets the eye. A few days ago, I found a long-forgotten DVD that my friend Carla mailed to me as a sadistic caprice: The Fast and the Furious (Collector’s Edition). I didn’t watch it when I got it, or for years after. Until now.
My familiarity with the Fast/Furious franchise isn’t as complete as that of Transformers (of which I managed to see every single one in theaters, godknowswhy.) It goes like this: 20 minutes of the third one from the back of a theater while waiting for another theater to clear out, then Fast Five two months ago, and finally the original one. F&tF is aiming for roughly the same demographic as the Transformers franchise: guys (mostly) who want to watch cool machines zip around, with the occasional gun shot, explosion, or glimpse of a hot chick on the side. Logically, it should be just as bad, right?
In this one, the protagonist Brian (a wooden Paul Walker) is an undercover cop out to foil a dastardly gang of criminal hijackers who also happen to be underground street racers. They use their riced out Honda Civics to hijack the cargo from semi trucks while on the actual highway, which is the clever bit that justifies the movie’s existence. Brian is no Shakespearean icon, but he actually undergoes change throughout the movie. I know! This, despite the fact that Walker can only flip from “slight smug smile” to “furrowed brow of deep thought.”
Everything -- everything -- in F&tF is as predictable as a school lunch, from the undercover cop falls for pretty girl bit, to the car racing scenes, to the array of sidekicks (the muscle, the brain, the hot tomboy), even to the cranky police boss (“Get into my office, O’Conner! You wrecked an $80,000 car!!!”). But F&tF has the advantage of not reaching too high. Walker’s character is simply trying to break a case. He’s not saving the world or tangling in shadowy conspiracies. So that platform frees up the script to focus on the real story, which is Brian sorting through his concepts of loyalty, friendship, and love -- while zipping around in fast cars. Conventional as the story may be, Brian and the other characters show a degree of self-examination that no one in Transformers even veers close to, as they blithely pick and switch sides in the battle for the future of the Earth itself.
Indeed, the cast of F&tF embodies the “live free or die” concept a lot better than the conniving, equivocating characters of Transformers (both human and robotic) ever do. Sure, F&tF has its ridiculous moments, particularly the final truck-jacking scene, where both the stunts and the motivations of the characters stretch one’s suspension of disbelief until it snaps. In particular, I could not get on board with the idea, pivotal to the movie’s plot, that a hired truck driver would have such a personal pride in his truck’s cargo that he’d be willing to risk his own life, or a murder rap, to protect it. Yet the movie depends on this premise to make that scene viable. Hell, no. On the other hand, that idea is less difficult to believe than nearly every plot point in Transformers.
Visually, too, F&tF beats the pants off Transformers. While the cars are riced out, cheesy, and brightly colored as toxic neon popsicles, the racing and action scenes are tightly shot and mostly coherent. You can tell exactly what’s going on. In Transformers, Michael Bay’s computer elves went off the deep end in creating set pieces and bot-on-bot violence that are unwatchably complex and confusing. The Autobots twist from sport cars into intricate cybernetic sculptures with a million tiny parts, but the Decepticons morph from...well, whatever they are...into Matrix-like nightmares that Hieronymus Bosch would have dismissed as overdone. Megatron becomes a massive, coiling serpent thingy that has far too much mass to come from one angry robot. Why the Decepticons move and change in way the Autobots apparently cannot is never explained, but it suggests some kind of weird racial subtext in their cybernetic rivalry. The battles between robots are dizzying, nauseating explosions of CGI splinters that are incomprehensible till the end, when we can see who still standing. It’s so overloaded it’s not even fun, kinda like the KFC Double Down.
The Fast & the Furious, as an aside, contains a scene that I recognized as my own personal version of hell. The characters head out to a Death Valley-ish desert for the unfortunately named “Race Wars,” where drivers test themselves and their cars against each other. It’s a world of baking heat, relentless sun, drinking, betting, objectified women, and machine-obsessed morons with their gas-guzzling cars. I HATE every single one of those things. But if you gave me the choice between the street racing criminals and the noble space robots? No contest. The Fast and the Furious: Forever.
Fast & the Furious: unexpectedly good
Transformers: Dark of the Moon: expectedly bad