A terrible fx movie from a truly talentless director 2/10

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 2007)

This film was a disaster. A mess. Unwatchable. The worst direction of a movie since the Island. I don't know what I enjoyed less, this or the Star Wars prequels.
The script was non existent. Confusing--stupid. Not even the writers of the cartoon show would have stooped to a level as mentally challenged as this. It wasn't even tongue in cheek or camp. It was just bad writing. Shame on the screenwriters--though is suspect the director had a lot to do with it so let me save my venom for him...
The fx: yes the compositing of cg into live action was very good--not as impressive as Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean but still very good. Unfortunately, the direction was so rotten as to spoil the sense of awe you might have expected from it and the fx sequences. For one thing--these 10 ton machines ran around like..well, 8 inch toys. They were hiding under bridges, stumbling through backyards without making impact tremors, basically reduced to a joke. Truly. There were very few moments where they behaved like actual gigantic machines. But who cares right? Its fantasy. OK well then give me great action sequences. But they weren't great. They were confusing and poorly edited--so much so you could hardly stay focused on the action.
This is why Michael Bay deserves a kick between the legs for being such a failure as a storyteller. Above all its his fault(and Spielberg's for urging him to do it.). If I go to see a movie about giant fx monsters, I expect bad writing, even bad acting, but I want to see cool action scenes if nothing else. But he directed them like he did the Island, confusing, choppy, constantly moving cameras that didn't focus on the characters long enough to stay absorbed in the moment of the story.
The only irony in the film is that when i heard about it I thought it was like Small Soldiers in reverse, so it was amusing for half a second to see the father from that movie playing the same role in this one. Small Soldiers was a much better movie.
Masters of the Universe 87 was a better movie. The animated cartoon movie better (and that is saying a lot). I actually wish it was as good as the first Jurassic Park--which had a lame story and weak dialogue--even that was genius next to this.
Its a shame someone like Paul Verhoeven couldn't have made this--he knew how to do an action sequence and if he was going to throw humor in it would have been more sophisticated
I give the film 2 points. 1 for the fx and the 1 for the casting of Cullen as Optimus Prime (even though his design was an eyesore and he didn't behave in a very dignified fashion).
I read somewhere that Bay used to work for George Lucas and when he heard about Raiders of the Lost Ark he dismissed it as a "toy movie." Well Bay really showed that he knows how to make a movie as if he was a 3 year old playing with a camera. This was one truly infantile movie.
A big budget Hollywood movie at its worst.