I had low expectations...and was still disappointed.

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2007)

I grew up watching the Transformers in the early-mid '80s. When I first heard that a live-action adaptation was in the works, I was interested. When I heard Stephen Spielberg was involved, I was excited. When I found out Michael Bay was involved, I was just depressed.
The original Transformers was a 22-minute, weekly animated series for children. You don't expect such shows to be long on plot, character development, etc, and it wasn't. But Bay has pulled off the impossible: he has created a big-budget, 2 1/2-hour feature film that is actually MORE simplistic than the original source material. Well done, Mike.
Optimus Prime is the only Transformer with a personality of his own. He spends most of his time over-doing the messiah bit; seems like he's conspicuously proclaiming his willingness to "sacrifice himself" every three or four minutes. The rest of them, Autobots and Decepticons alike, have completely interchangeable personalities; you can't tell them apart by the way they act (except for the horribly, unnecessarily stereotyped Jazz), and you CERTAINLY can't tell them apart by the way they look--one walking pile of tires and hoses looks much like another.
All Bay had to do was keep it simple. But, of course, he failed. He utilized a completely ridiculous ensemble cast of characters, with new ones being introduced right up until the last quarter or so of the movie. Air Force combat controllers, hormonal high school students, chubby computer hackers, shadowy government agents, public officials, and many other pointless characters stagger across the screen bumping into each other, stealing each other's lines and cluttering up the screen.
The story moves at a ridiculous pace--close to an hour goes by before we see any real Autobot v. Decepticon action. It's hinted (but never actually said) that Megatron is more powerful and fearsome than the other Transformers. So he shows up in the last five minutes and is killed, almost as an afterthought, by a sixteen year old.
The special effects are, of course, good, but everything else in this screaming disappointment of a movie is a complete failure.