Really good Transformers adaption

Rating: 9/10 (15 July 2007)

It's almost a buddy movie AND a war movie. There's the bigger story of the war, and there's also the smaller story with the guy, the girl and Bumblebee going on at the same time.
The Transformers are all alien robots that possess the ability to scan any other machine and then turn themselves into a copy of it. Usually they tend to add the Autobot or Decepticon symbol somewhere. The Decepticons, at least, also have the ability to produce a holographic representation of a human sitting inside them. The main difference between the Autobots and Decepticons seems to be political; the Autobots refuse to harm humans, whereas the Decepticons want to destroy us all. All of them seem to have learned English and other information about Earth from the Internet.
In the smaller story, Bublebee is a teenager's first car. Bumblebee seems almost over-enthusiastic in trying to help the kid get laid. The girl is hot. Picture "Herbie" meets "American Pie". (Well, maybe not American Pie, they don't go that far, but one of those movies)
The kid and Bublebee were also being pursued by a police car with the Decepticon symbol on the side. This part of the story reminded me a bit of Terminator T but much bigger and more menacing.
One of the great things about this movie, which surprised even me, is that they actually managed to make the Decepticons scary and creepy. Particularly the Helicopter and Soundwave (I think it was Soundwave. The only remotely Soundwave-like thing about it was that it took the form of a DVD player, and Soundwave was a tape player.)
Soundwave is a much smaller Decepticon than the others. He seems to be acting basically as a spy. He's this little, almost gremlin-like creature, constantly sneaking around and hiding when humans might see him. He's roughly 30 or 50 cm tall at his full height, whereas the others average 5, 10 meters tall.
I won't tell you too much about Megatron.
COMPLAINTS;
Unlike the cartoon, their design seems to be over-complicated, they seem to break into too many small parts when they transform. Almost as if they were trying too hard to make it look different from a toy. This creates two main problems; A) it makes it allot more difficult to follow or figure out how they transform, which is exactly what was so interesting about Transformers back in the 80's B) It also makes their faces too complicated, which means it's hard to tell them apart. Particularly the Decepticons.
In some of the action sequences towards the end, they used shaky cameras and dust just to make it look more "real". In fact it just looks shaky. Cinema Varitae is vastly over-rated.