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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
The opening scene of Michael Bay's "Transformers" takes place in deep space. Out of the darkness comes a voice that is deeper still. It makes Barry White sound like a countertenor, and this is what it says: "Before time began, there was the Cube." Hello? Mr. Rubik?
The film that ensues is acrylically bright, and the only way to match its median sound level would be to blow up a trombone factory, yet what descended on me in that first scene was a wintry pall of mystification. It never really lifted, but then I never collected small, twisted pieces of vehicular weaponry in the mid-nineteen-eighties, or watched the animated TV series that followed, and thus it is not to me that Bay is exposing his innermost soul. Transformers, as any parent who has ever bruised a heel on Bonecrusher can tell you, were a line of toys that could, given sufficient wrenching, be turned from cars and planes into robots and back again. Nowadays, we would call this recycling, but at the climax of the Cold War it felt more like eternal readiness. You could sit moodily in the back of your parents' Pontiac Sunbird and imagine cruise missiles bursting out of the headlamps.
Now these delightful objets d'art have a movie to themselves. We should not be surprised. Long ago, when the impact of "Star Wars" was beefed up...
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