Falls short of all reasonable expectations

Rating: 2/10 (10 July 2007)

The way I see it there are two problems with this movie.
First, there were a dozen extra characters who served no purpose other than to prolong a barely connected subplot. Threads were begun -- one taken directly from Independence Day -- that had no resolution or real bearing on the story. The result is a good forty minutes you could edit out without impacting the story at all.
Second, this is a Transformers movie in which key players didn't start appearing until halfway into the film. It feels less like a dramatic buildup and more like a floundering story. Only a fraction of the movie contains fighting between the bots and there's even less in the way of character background or development. While most of the Autobot personalities you do see will be familiar to us 30-somethings, we never really get to know the Decepticons at all.
The only positive thing I can say about the film is that the few battles you do get look great. In the end I think it suffers from lack of focus and not delivering enough of what I really wanted to see. Reinventing the story is absolutely fine. But at its core, it's supposed to be about epic Good vs Evil featuring transforming robots. That's just not what this movie was about.