Someone messed up.

Rating: 4/10 (3 August 2007)

There's apparently a T-shirt going around which reads, "Michael Bay raped my childhood." Since Transformers didn't play a huge part of my youth, I can safely say my childhood remains pure and untouched, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this movie is terribly flawed.
People seem to be overwhelmed by the beautiful CGI, and I admit the Autobots and Decepticons both look fantastic. The transformations and movement are fluid and I was as impressed as everyone else. But I didn't let that blind me to the simple fact that the script was not becoming of such a well-loved franchise.
If you're make a film about giant alien robots that can turn into motor vehicles and fight each other with giant cannons, don't make us wait forty minutes to see any kind of action. With the exception of the Decepticon attack on a US military base in Qatar, there was virtually no robot-related activity for the first half an hour. Bumblebee was in almost every scene following his introduction, yet we have to wait and wait and wait to see him transform.
Now maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. Maybe they needed that time to properly introduce the human characters. But the last time I checked, the title of the movie was TRANSFORMERS. I like Shia LeBeouf as much as anybody else, but if I wanted to watch a film about Even Stevens' attempts to get a girlfriend, I wouldn't have paid to see TRANSFORMERS.
And another thing - who had the bright idea of keeping Megatron (you know, the main antagonist) stuck in a bunker until the third act? And when he and Optimus Prime finally, FINALLY, get to fight, who thought it would be a really great idea to cut back to the soldiers in the middle of the robot-on-robot beatdown that everybody waited two God damn hours to see? I'm giving the film 4 out of 10 purely because the Transformers were brilliantly realised. It's just a shame all that good CGI went to waste. The possibility of a sequel is there, especially as I'm sure the film will do great business at the box office. I just hope they hire a new screenwriter for it. Someone really messed up when it came to making this movie.