This movie makes me embarrassed to be a Transformers fan.

Rating: 2/10 (27 September 2007)

First of all, let me get this out of the way: yes, I'm a long-time Transformers fan. However, I am by no means a purist (my favorite TF series was Beast Wars), and I'm not giving this movie a low rating simply because they changed things from the original series. The franchise has gone through so many reboots, retoolings and new continuities that it never even occurred to me to be upset about the idea of another one. That's not to say that there weren't elements of this movie that I had problems with as a fan, but they had little to do with my overall opinion of the movie.
Since it's the least important element of this review, I'll get the fan-related stuff out of the way first. All of these are things I could easily have overlooked if the rest of the movie had been in any way good, so unless you really care about this stuff, feel free to skip down to the next paragraph. Obviously, the designs were one issue I had. In no way was I expecting a direct translation of their G1 forms, but if they're going to keep the classic names, they could at least give the other characters the respect they gave Prime by making them at least somewhat recognizable. Just look at the G1 repaint of the Starscream toy, for example; some different heads and more G1-based paint jobs could have done wonders. Also on the design front, I didn't like Bumblebee being a top-of-the-line sports car and Starscream's robot mode being very hulking and brutish, as I felt those choices went in the exact opposite direction of the spirit of their namesakes (Bumblebee being the not-too-fast, not-too-strong underdog with a lot of heart, and Starscream being a character who relied on his speed, agility and cunning rather than brute force). On the story side, I disliked the inference that Prime and Megatron were brothers (although at least it wasn't explicitly stated like in the draft script). Also, the statement by the producers that they couldn't do Soundwave because "the audience wouldn't believe the whole mass-shifting thing" kind of loses its weight when you have a 20-story cube compress itself to about the size of a basketball.
As far as the script goes, it was downright awful. It tried to be way too many things, and pulled them all off poorly. It kept jumping haphazardly and without warning between alien invasion explosion-fest, military/war film, bad teenage romance, government conspiracy movie, and tech/hacker "thriller," each of which had its own unique pacing that didn't mesh with that of any of the other story lines. There were unnecessary plot lines, scenes that were pointless and/or way too long (most notably the failed attempt at comedy that was the yard scene, which was both), characters and plot lines that were just forgotten about, and more plot holes than I could count. The few characters that got any development at all (who were almost all human) were incredibly stereotypical. The Decepticons (who have always been my faction of choice) in particular suffered a severe lack of character development, being reduced to "bad guys who destroy things." The dialogue was no better, rife with stilted phrasing, clunky exposition, and instances of natural flow being sacrificed for forced references to sponsoring products. The result was a script so hollow and generic that while I could easily predict what would happen (after all, I'd seen it a hundred times before in different, much better movies), I didn't really care enough to do so.
As for the acting, Shia did a decent job considering how little he had to work with, but he's always rubbed me the wrong way for some reason. Still, if you don't mind his other work you'll probably like him here. Megan Fox's performance was what you'd expect; she's there for her looks, not her acting ability. The rest of the live cast were either dumbfoundingly hammy (Turtorro), clearly phoning it in (Voight), or utterly forgettable (pretty much everyone else). The voice actors, though, particularly Peter Cullen, did a great job despite the lousy script. It's a shame they got so few lines.
Finally, there was the direction, which was definitively Michael Bay. Like many trendy directors, his philosophy seems to be that the shakier the camera and the more cuts you make, the more "intense" an action scene becomes. Unfortunately, it almost always ends up turning it into a confused mess. That proves to be all the more true when the focus of the scene is two incredibly complex CG robots in a hand-to-hand brawl. As a result, one of the film's few redeeming features (ILM's impressive special effects) is largely wasted in baffling fight scenes that come across as a large moving pile of spiky metal pieces rather than two robots fighting for their lives.
Overall, this was easily the worst new film I've seen all year. There are only three things that kept me from giving this awful movie a 1. First of all, Peter Cullen and the rest of the voice cast performed admirably. Second, as I said, the CG itself was amazing, as wasted as it was. Finally, there were a couple of fleeting moments where I did get a mild "it's a live-action Transformers movie!" rush (mostly due to Cullen). Unfortunately, they were brief, few and far between, and occurred only when the robots stayed relatively still, as that's the only time I could really tell what I was looking at. And that tiny thrill is more than negated by the fact that I can no longer wear my Decepticon logo shirt (which, until this movie came out, was one of my favorite shirts) without the hassle of explaining to strangers who try to start conversations about it that I thought it was an utterly lousy movie.