Not very classy but potentially enjoyable.

Rating: 7/10 (7 December 2014)

This movie and its series are all a matter of taste. You'll probably like one and only one of the four Transformers movies. Each one is like a different flavoring of the same food, so there will probably be one that you think is decent and one that you absolutely hate. For me, this first installment is the one that fits my tastes best (I absolutely hated Revenge of the Fallen), though not in all areas. All of the first three movies (I can't speak for Age of Extinction since I haven't seen it) try to be an all around crowd pleaser in kind of the same way that Forrest Gump does but with much less class. The filmmakers tried to include lots of humor, a fairly prominent love story, a scattered amount of character development, and overriding action. The final product comes together okay, but the style it's done in has so much personality that it can't get much praise from critics.
The first aspect I will address is the characters. Overall the filmmakers get about a B- for the characters, but this grade results from the averaging of the good and bad. The minor characters got the best development like the Airforce guy taking the long road back to his family and the government and hackers investigating the Decepticon messages. However, the main human roles of Sam, Mikala, and the one government agent who comes back in the other two were not well written. Mikala had zero personality, which never helps for any character. Sam was too greedy and undeserving of recognition to be a good hero, but I'll get into more detail with that in regard to the story. The government agent had a believable jerky personality, but implausibly negative actions like how he hides everything he has discovered already about transformers. The Transformers were diversely written with lots of personality, but I feel like their personalities collectively are a mix of Lord of the Rings and a group of street punks. Optimus and Megatron are very dramatic and speak in menacing tones while all of their followers act like the whole thing is a big game. I'm not familiar with the Transformers cartoons, so maybe this is commonplace for the robots. The redeeming aspect of the characters is that none of them are poorly acted, only poorly written to an extent.
Next is the storyline, which has a number of branches. The main branch involves Sam Whitwicky, Mikala, and Sam's new "car". Sam getting the girl of his dreams is rather reminiscent of the early 2000's Spiderman movies in that extraordinary circumstances bring them together instead of any actions on Sam's part and the fact that Sam is portrayed kind of a loser. The second largest branch is the Autobots and Decepticons both trying to obtain the Allspark that will save their race. The third branch is the government trying to make sense of all of the alien activity and how they should deal with it. The fourth and final branch is the deployed soldiers that are returning home to the States only to get caught up in the middle of the alien war. None of the plots are very hard to follow and are very simple and straightforward.
The next and smaller aspect is the comedy element. The filmmakers overtly try to put laughs in the movie in frequent and large amounts. Humor is, of course, a matter of taste, so I won't say whether it's good or bad. I suppose it is well delivered and has a consistent style throughout, although we get comedic lines from many different characters.
Lastly is the action and its execution. The transformers are basically big fish fighting in a too small pond. Any time they go into combat, whatever venue they choose to fight at has to be rebuilt from scratch after the battle. The fights are very explosive with huge guns and large scale boxing matches. There is some human interaction with these fights, but the humans are very technologically outclassed so there is little they can do to harm the robots. The effects are obviously big budget and are very sharp, realistic, and cool in a sci- if way (i.e. the way the transformers transition from car to humanoid shape.
On the whole, it appeals to popular cinematic whims and isn't anything that's going to last through the ages. However, it can be enjoyable, but not if you like movies with lots of thought and class put into them. If more pictures follow the four that already exist, they will make lots of money, but not get great critical reviews as they have in the past. If you didn't like this one, I would actually recommend watching the other ones because one of them will probably strike your fancy. Overall Rating: 8.2/10.