I look at Transmorphers: Fall of Man, The Asylum’s straight-to-DVD prequel to its own Transmorphers, where alien tech reverse engineered after Roswell lets robots wake up inside our cars, phones and satellite dishes and turn on the people who own them, and then the aliens themselves turn up to terraform the planet.
I’m a sci-fi buff and I really did try, but this one is bad. Bruce Boxleitner is the only actor with any skills on show, the robots do things that make no sense at all, and by the time the human spirit saves the day I was shouting at the screen. I’m sorry you had to suffer through it with me.
SciFi buff that I am, I thought I had to give this a try … I really, really did try … but this is bad. No other way to say it really. The only “actor” that has any skills is good ole B5’s Bruce Boxleitner and let’s be honest, he was never that great shakes, was he? He was Sheridan on Babylon 5 for most of that show’s run, so he knows his way around a sci-fi set, but even he can’t do much with what he’s handed here.
So I guess you want to know what’s going on, right? Well, if you were expecting Transformers … you’ll be very disappointed. Transmorphers: Fall of Man comes from The Asylum, the studio that churns out cheap lookalike movies to sit on the shelf next to the big summer releases, and it’s a prequel to their own Transmorphers from a couple of years before. I know with a straight-to-DVD movie I really shouldn’t expect much, and I didn’t, but somehow it still managed to come in under the bar. Transmorphers is the kind of name that’s built to catch your eye in the bargain bin and not much else.
Perhaps the SciFi channel spoiled me with all of their good shows and productions over the years. This is definitely NOT one of those … “B” Movie is the best you could call this. Machines turning on the people who built them is a great idea for a story, and it’s been done properly before, The Matrix made a whole trilogy out of it. Here it’s mostly people running away from props that look like they cost about fifty bucks each, and a lot of shouting.
Roswell, reverse engineering and an angry satellite dish
The story is that when the aliens crashed in Roswell we (humans) reverse engineered their technology and used it to create the modern age that we all live in now. All our phones, cars and gadgets are built on alien tech, which on its own isn’t a bad hook, Doctor Who got a lot of mileage out of ordinary stuff we take for granted being something else with those little black cubes. With the technology that they put into place however, the robotic aliens are able to “activate” and transform some machines, which then set about destroying their human owners.
It kicks off in Bakersfield, California with a girl chatting on her cellphone while she’s driving, the sheriff pulls her over and the phone comes to life and kills her. From there the town starts going mad. Jake, a former Marine who’s back home working as a cable repair guy, pulls a gun on a satellite dish in somebody’s grandmother’s house because he swears it came alive, and of course nobody believes him until it’s too late. Add a scientist from Homeland Security and the sheriff’s daughter, who just happens to be Jake’s ex, and that’s our little band of heroes. It’s a perfectly good setup for a cheap thriller to be honest, a handful of people in one small town working out that the stuff in their pockets and driveways wants them dead. If it had stayed there and kept things small, I think I’d have been a lot more forgiving.
Some really stupid things happen here. The SUV randomly attacks the sheriff (Bruce) for no reason whatsoever. Then the satellite dish that had turned itself into a robot (I know!! Who writes this stuff??) randomly appears but then doesn’t do anything aside from jumping down from a building??? There’s a whole sequence built up to that dish and it just sort of leaps and that’s it. I kept waiting for it to matter, and it never does.
Bruce Boxleitner and the helicopter
Bruce plays Sheriff Hadley Ryan and he really is the only one in the cast who looks like he’s done this before. He walks through it with a bit of authority and a straight face, which takes some doing when you’re being chased by an SUV, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed he was the one thing holding it together. Everybody else is either shouting or standing about waiting for the effects to be added in later, and you can tell.
In a huge battle, Bruce B crashes an army helicopter into one of the activated machines and destroys it, unfortunately killing himself in the process (which eliminates any acting cred this movie might have had!). Everyone thinks that it’s all over and that they had stopped the machines before they had sent their signal, but nope … the aliens are coming!! So the one guy I was actually watching it for is gone just as the movie decides it’s going to get bigger, which is about the worst trade it could make.
And bigger is where it all falls apart. Destroying all of Earth’s military (they don’t show how) the survivors of humanity are now forced to try and destroy the alien invasion before they steal all of Earth’s resources. They don’t show how, of course, because showing it would cost money, so we just get told it happened and jump forward. What would robots need with Earth’s water??? They come from space for crying out loud …
Terraforming for machines (and why I finished it anyway)
At this point I came very, very close to switching it off. OK, I thought, I can’t take any more of this … but you know, I feel the same way you probably do about leaving something undone, so I pushed on and saw it through to the end. I’m glad I can say I finished it, I’m just not glad about what I finished, because it is garbage.
Anyways, the story continues that they are terraforming the whole earth to make it more “habitable” for them. (1) You can’t call it terraforming if it’s for machines, can you?? And (2) how do you make something more habitable for a machine!! Do they need it a bit less humid? More plug sockets? It’s the kind of idea that sounds cool in a pitch meeting and falls apart as soon as you think about it for more than about five seconds, and this movie gives you an awful lot of time to think.
Well, humanity has fought back, seems not all of the military was destroyed after all, and they’ve managed to take out 3 of the 9 terraforming plants around the world. However there are still quite a few left and our hero is going to take out one of them himself. By the way, the way in which they discover this detail? The Russians had captured a machine and tortured it to give up its secrets!!! How do you torture a machine for crying out loud??!! Unplug it and plug it back in again? Make it sit through this movie? Honestly that last one might have worked, it nearly worked on me, and I’m the one who chose to watch it.
The plants, the Russians and the human spirit
Blond boy (that’s Jake, played by Shane Van Dyke, who also wrote the thing, which explains a lot about who got the hero part) is able to destroy one of the terraforming plants, and it looks like the other forces were also able to destroy the ones they were tasked with. But destroying the terraforming plants had a side effect and the remaining humans were forced underground to survive. So we end up with mankind hiding in tunnels from the machines, which is a big jump from a sheriff getting chased by an SUV in Bakersfield.
It’s that jump that sums up the whole movie for me really. It can’t decide if it’s a small-town killer gadget story or a world war against the robots, so it does a bit of both badly and neither one well. The small-town half at least has Bruce in it. The war half has people in tunnels telling each other how brave they are while the budget runs out around them, and the effects get worse the bigger the stakes get, which is the wrong way round.
The fight for survival continues and the human race will survive because they have something that the machines don’t … THE HUMAN SPIRIT. aaaaargggh!!!!!!!
I’m sorry that you had to suffer through this with me.
If you were writing it, what would a fleet of alien robots actually want from Earth, since it clearly can’t be the water? Tell me in the comments.