Lots of action, lack of imagination

Rating: 4/10 (3 March 2008)

If you are a fan of acting or suspense, this is not your film. This film comes across at times as a 2 hour infomercial for Hasbro, GMC and Hostess.
If you've outgrown being a teenager, this film may be a bit too juvenile for you; for children under 12 - this film may be inappropriate because of the unnecessary dialog touching on masturbation, sex, and flat out disrespect for the elderly (which was really disturbing, considering this film is directed at least in part towards the young consumers of hasbro's toys - see their website for transformers products "as seen in the movie"; how many teens still play with toys?) The line from Bernie Mac ("Bobby Bolivia") directed at his grandmother is a stellar example: "If I had a rock I'd bust you in the head, b*tch." Try explaining that one away to a kid. This along with the American Pie style masturbation conversation between Sam and his parents was also particularly out of place. Is this a movie about a boy growing up, or a battle between robot-invaders? The awkwardness of Sam may strike a chord with a few people in the demographic, but comes across in general as overdone, and for the plot, completely unnecessary. Terminator 2 had the same demographic and managed to pull of a great action movie without the cheap laughs.
Highlights of the film were really the action sequences and the flawless CGI work. The transformation of the machines themselves was very well done.
The plot was loosely stitched together and lacked the real imagination needed to pull-off a movie like this. The Autobots have mainly standard weaponry (bullets, rockets etc.) at times they use some kind of pulse weapon but that was about it. You'd figure advanced beings from another star would have a couple more tricks up their sleeves. The explanation of how the "signals" used to break into government worked was weak and just looked like a second-class visualization of an mp3 file. To show pictographs floating around in a virtual data stream was a bit goofy - and the fact that this American hacker had written code to read the pictographs encoded by the alien beings was also a bit unusual.
The constant movement from location to location and action was really necessary to keep one from asking himself too many questions about just what was going on - because it really doesn't make much sense if you look at it long enough. Aside from the transformers conventional weapons, the fact that the transformers not only speak English to one another but speak slang (e.g. Optimus Prime's "my bad") is hard to overlook.
All in all it is a mass-marketing phenomenon that made a lot of money for those that financed it. It wasn't much of a thrill ride, but probably sold quite a few toys (hi George Lucas!)