The trailers show giant robots tearing through cities and turning into vehicles, so we know they got that right. But they only give a hint at the humor in "Transformers." It’s not just one liners. The film puts Autobots into fish out of water situation to derive comedy. Balancing that without losing the kick-ass fun was the screenwriters’ job.
"The hardest balance actually was tone," said writer Roberto Orci. "Honestly, people are going to come at this thing. It’s a cartoon, it’s a toy line, it’s for kids. It’s not a movie. One of the ethics was trying to make it as realistic as possible. And yes, it’s Transformers and there’s a long history of fun in it so it all had to be fun. Those two, realism and fun, are complete opposites so the hardest part was walking the line in tone."
The comedy could only come when they mastered the tone. "That was fun but it was also hard. It was the icing on the cake. Everything else had to be sort of in place before we could kind of get to that moment. We had to make sure that the structure of the movie was a solid paradigm that you could hit with a hammer and it wouldn’t fall apart before we fully committed to what the humor could be. But it was always implicit in the process. It had to be fun."
"Transformers" is out this Tuesday, July 2 and currently sits at 82 percent on the Tomatometer.
