A Major Disappointment

Rating: 2/10 (4 April 2008)

This film takes the cake as being one of the most disappointing films ever made. The biggest problem takes place as some of the worst stereotyped human characters make appearances instead of Transformers. There was more to the source material than just fighting robots. The cult fanbase surrounding the original 1986 animated movie, the multiple cartoon shows, and even comics is nearly legendary. Those did not insult the intelligence of the viewer as they were well written for what they were. The route Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci took for this film was to make a poor action film with a script on par with Bad Boys II. This could have been a cool sci-fi epic as the Transformers were like humans and had similar feelings to humans. Instead, they are backstory much like the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. The thing is that those films worked because it was more appropriate to have the human characters as the central characters. The ending has the human character taking charge by using the cube to take out Megatron instead of one of the Transformers makes the ending bad and 85 percent of the film is just talking about the plot with minimal payoff.
Poor humor consists of bad jokes on par with Date Movie, which consisted of bad sex jokes and body fluid jokes.
The action scenes are typical Michael Bay, so I would say they are about average. The CGI by ILM looks great, but the shaky camera angles and close-ups make things difficult to see.
The film is padded out with pointless scenes that include scenes straight out of a Call of Duty game or an Army recruitment ad. These scenes did not belong in the movie and are just an excuse to put more product placement and action scenes in. There has to be some kind of record for the amount of product placement in the movie.
There are scenes that are needlessly sappy too. Why they did that is beyond me. It may not be Hook sappy, but it seems forced and makes me think they were trying to makes this appeal to the largest audience possible.
And what's the deal with those unlikeable characters, they might as well have put Tara Reid into the scientist role that Rachael Taylor got. The decision by Michael Bay to have Shia (who is actually a pretty decent actor just thrown into a bad script) be more of an average character and more stereotypical character than the original nerdier character that was more like Spike from the show.
The musical choices were a botch job too, but that is only really a minor complaint that I won't go into, but having nu-metal tunes mixed with older songs seems out of place.
This film doesn't know what it wants to be and a film that should have not been this confusing is and this can now be take Hook's title of being the worst film that Spielberg was ever involved in. To all the people involved, you messed up what could have been great and this can also be the worst film to have made over 150 million dollars, but not the worst Michael Bay film. That still goes to Bad Boys II.
2/10 PG-13 - Violence, Language, and Juvenile Sex Jokes
Avoid this film is you are really looking for a Transformers movie, but if you are looking for a dumb action film, give this 5/10.