A Movie with a Lot of Unrealized Potential

Rating: 5/10 (18 October 2007)

Biggest problem with the movie: they couldn't decide on their target audience. Half of the movie seems designed for kids and half for adults. It's a show that I could see working well either way, but trying to do both at once didn't work. Most of the humor is directed toward a very young audience, I would say roughly 8-12. This includes especially the whole segment with the Autobots hiding from the parents in the backyard, or anything involving Sector 7. As a child, I would have been pissing myself in glee at the sheer hilarity. As an adult, I find it cheesy beyond all measure, boring, and a needless distraction from the plot. Other parts would either bore such young children or make their parents really nervous, such as the violence, the romance, and the remaining humor (e.g. the Mom's masturbation lines). Prime's moral statements and defenses of human potential again would be perfectly satisfactory for a child, but seem incredibly shallow and simplistic to me as an adult. This could have been a great kids' film. It could have been a great adult action film. It ended up being neither.
Other cons: the shallowness and inaccessibility of the main characters. There was no one I really identified with, empathized with, or worried about. Also, there was too much going on. Stories such as the lost soldiers in Qatar or the intrigues of Sector 7 or the female computer analyst could each have been the central plot of a movie. As it was, they were all side-shows which looked more promising than they were able to be in the time given them.
Pros: The action sequences were very nice, and the transformation graphics were superb. Visually the film was very rewarding. The idea of having your car choose you or come to your defense in peril is very cool (part of the appeal of the transformer concept itself). Also, it featured the A-10, albeit briefly. The heroin is easy to look at.