Not too happy with what meets my eye.

Rating: 4/10 (7 July 2007)

The Transformers movie is not in my mind a success. There is a potentially cool, fun movie in here but director Michael 'Monkey with a camera' Bay and the writers seriously dropped the ball. The movie starts out okay with the scenes of the soldiers encountering the Transformers is the desert and the introductions to the teen characters aren't too annoying. After this promising introduction things go nowhere fast. There is far too little Transformer action on screen for the first two thirds of the movie- what we do get is cool but there is too much lame filler material with the teenage humans that just goes on and on. Most of it is lame lowest common denominator attempts at comedy such as the whole masturbation scene with Sam Witwicky's parents, the cowardly hacker and the government spook played by poor John Turturro. The whole slapstick sequence with the Transformers hiding from Sam's parents is just painfully unfunny. Sadly, it is one of the few sequences where we get to see the Transformers in action without it being spoiled with shaky-cam. When all the Transformers have actually arrived on earth, well over half way into the movie and we finally get to see what we paid to big robots beating the tar out of each other it is ruined by the editing and camera work. Yes that bane of modern action movies the shaky cam and the overly frenetic editing of Michael Bay make it really hard to see what the hell is going on up on the screen. These scenes look like they're amazing and should be tremendous fun. The CGI is excellent, the Transformers look solid and interact with the real world very well- almost real and the fight scenes show a lot of imagination and creativity  the stuff on the freeway, Transformers going through buildings. However, it is barely possible to work out what is going on screen or even what Transformers you are even looking at as they pummel each other. I wasn't expecting much from this movie- all I wanted was cool scenes of giant robots transforming and beating the crap out each other, I wasn't worried too much about plot or anything like that (How much plot can you expect from a movie based on a kid's cartoon from the eighties designed to sell toys) but they managed to screw it up. If they had lopped of about 30-40 minutes of the running time, mostly the lame comedic padding from the first half and actually shot the battle scenes in a halfway competent fashion this could have been a pretty cool movie. (Chauvinist moment- Despite the great CGI I would have to say the best visual effects shots are those lingering pans of Megan Fox when she is trying to fix Bumblebee).