An excellent homage to an 80s classic

Rating: 9/10 (5 July 2007)

As a young teen in 1984 I was a major fan of Transformers. So, when I learned it was coming out as a movie I was psyched, but worried that movie makers would screw it up and leave it unrecognizable.
I was there opening night, with my kids, ready for anything. What I saw on the screen was quintessential Transformers and I was Pleased. Even though it was updated to reflect the 12st Century, this was the Transformers I knew.
I would have liked to see more character development for the Transformers, and less for the humans. Much of the Transformers characterizations relied on knowledge of and referred to the original cartoon, such as Megatron's seemingly non-sequitor comment to Starscream regarding Starscream's repeated failures.
The good side to this is that for fans of the original Transformers, there were many references to the cartoon. The nature of the Transformers arrival was changed, as was their reason for being on Earth.
Transformers is NOT a movie for kids. I saw at least one mom taking her child (age 5?) out of the theater after repeated "colorful" language and violence, including many graphic scenes of human death, and overt sexual innuendo. Even the cartoon of the 80s was rather dark, one of the few cartoons where characters, human and Transformer, actually died in battle.