Here is the longest non-review review of Transformers you’re likely to see today.

If you visit Burbanked with any regularity, you’ve probably figured out by now that I don’t write many movie reviews. I always thought I would populate this site with regular reviews, but the fact is that I go out to the movies with much less regularity than I’d like, so it’s been difficult to structure this site around my reviews of the movies I see. What’s more, I tend to read so much around the bloguverse about movies that I usually convince myself that everything that needs to be said, has been said.

This post will not be a formal review of Michael Bay’s Transformers. In some ways I feel obligated to stage an actual, synopsis-and-critique review, having railed against this movie for nearly as long as I’ve been blogging.

But I can’t bring myself to do it. I saw the movie recently and each time I review it in my head, my thoughts spin off in 28 different directions and I can’t land on a single, unifying string to write about. The only thing that gels my reaction to Transformers at all is how angry and cranky I get when I think about it.

Transformers is a movie so dumbed-down, so insulting in its foolishness and so haphazard in its storytelling that it actually makes Armageddon feel subtle and measured by comparison. Plot in this movie is an afterthought; character development is reduced to jokey one-liners and throw-away “moments” shoehorned into the middle of overblown action scenes. The humor is painfully stilted, aimed only at 8-year-olds and under, and even pretty lame on that level.

I have a theory that Michael Bay shows up to the movie set each day, is handed the day’s scheduled script pages and then says things like “Yeah, this is great. But can we throw a scene with a motorcycle into this bit?” or in the middle of shooting something he turns to an assistant director and says “Wow, this just isn’t working. Go get me a Sikorsky helicopter and a funny black guy.” Because every scene in this movie feels thrown together, unplanned and reckless and unstructured. Michael Bay makes movies like my mom makes meatloaf - just open up the fridge, throw all the leftovers into it and see what you’ve got when it’s done.

To be sure, there are moments of visual excitement to be found in Transformers, and some of the transformations in and of themselves are excellently rendered. That expense and care and expertise have been prodigiously exhausted on this movie is never in dispute - but these things are never, ever in the service of a comprehensible or efficient story. The fans can say all they want about how this isn’t meant to be a highbrow movie and that haters like me are too smug or elitist to relax and “get it”, but the fact is that summer blockbusters should really be exciting and thrilling and still feature stories that aren’t as stupid and scattershot as what Bay has created here. Anyone who suggests that a summer blockbuster doesn’t need to have believable characters or a solid story to be successful clearly has no affinity for the likes of Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Spider-Man, Robocop, Back to the Future, Terminator, Men In Black, Airplane or a legion of others.

See what just happened? I didn’t plan to get riled up and here I’m getting all cranky just thinking about it. The one thing that I’ve been wrong about in writing about this movie for the past year or so is that I always anticipated that the premise alone was bad; that the idea of a Transformers movie was ill-advised. I’ll say now that I actually think this might have had potential for greatness beyond the superficiality of its box office success. I kept comparing it to T2 while I was watching it and I kept thinking about how great Cameron could have made this, how he could have infused the characters and the robots with actual drama and motivation and how he could have staged the action sequences so much better with a sense of spatial relationships, dramatic stakes and rising tension.

I’ve prattled long enough about this, but I wanted to direct you to three related links of interest:

• This is a great - no, amazingly terrific and great - analysis of Michael Bay’s style and the Transformers aesthetic from the Booth Film Critics Society. This article is so completely and wonderfully quotable that I wish I could just cut and paste the whole thing and pretend I’d written it. Big thanks to Tim for the link.
• Vern at AICN does a comprehensive and spectacular job of detailing much of what’s wrong with Transformers. And man but does he bring the hate on himself as a result.
• And finally, check out this hilarious response to a negative review, reportedly from Michael Bay himself. Either the product of a director proudly wearing his ego and insecurity most un-macho-ly on his sleeve or an imposter with way too much time on his hands (found via Jim Emerson’s scanners blog).