Best Action movie to date

Rating: 9/10 (9 July 2007)

I went to see the summer actioner called Transformers last night and that was before I read the headline from Variety Online (see below):
'TRANSFORMERS' DOMINATES BOX OFFICE Robots set seven-day record Transformation complete. Quickly rising to become a summer hit, DreamWorks and Paramount's robot actioner "Transformers" scored the best seven-day showing for a nonsequel in history, clobbering previous record holder "Spider-Man."
End Variety piece ***************************************************
I am a self-described movie buff meaning that the purview of my movie watching covers a wide swath of land from Dumb and Dumber to Glengarry Glen Ross. Thus, it is and was, that I looked forward to catching this movie and predicted to anyone that would listen that it would be the best action movie of the summer. ("Best action movie of the summer" is like saying "tallest player of the basketball team" and does not necessarily mean the best movie of the summer.)
And it delivered. Apparently, as can be deduced from the Variety headline, others agree with me. Of course, the first question that came to this mind as I considered plunking down the hard-earned coin for a kids movie was: how can a cartoon (Hollywood has put out a few of these recently.) transcend all of the baggage that usually drags these movies into the predictable and, hence unwatchable, zone?
Perhaps, it was the iconoclastic touch of director Michael Bay who, no conservative by a long shot, is nonetheless scorned by the Hollywood elite because of his identification with the fly-over set's aesthetics. Or maybe, relatedly, it was the mostly positive portrayal of the American military and DoD in an era when the media seems hellbent on vilifying anything in camouflage. Maybe the opening scene which - doing exactly what an opening scene is supposed to do - grabs you by the throat and sets the bar very high for the rest of the film, and then, by consistently matching the standard set for itself, allows you to settle in and enjoy the ride. Or maybe the choice of ideal leading characters in the ideal sense of Platonic forms.
Not that the film was perfect. It is, after all, just a summer sprint along the beach, and ironically, I thought that the denouement was predictable and banal. But the first hour-and-a-half ride was an above average romp full of laughs and impossible situations punctuated by popcorn-dropping special effects.