Incredible eye candy blockbuster that admirably tries to be more

Rating: 8/10 (24 June 2009)

Let me be forthright: this is an 8/10 on the entertainment scale, coming from someone who as a child, rented the original animated series over and over again every time his parents took him to blockbuster. This is not an 8/10 quality movie, but it gets that rating because it might be the most visually entertaining movie made to date.
I remember nearly fainting when I saw the first teaser for "Transformers." That shock and awe factor certainly plays a huge role in enjoying this movie. If you thought Michael Bay made explosive movies before, try adding CGI to the mix. On the eye candy scale, we're talking the equivalent of Belgian chocolate here. Seeing the transformations happen and being teased a little more with them each time generates all the audience interest this film needs. Those who dislike Bay's over-explosive style will find more to critique here, but in all honesty, the man does a fine job giving us the entertainment we paid for.
More interestingly, the trick that writers Robert Orci ("Mission Impossible III" and Bay's "The Island") and Alex Kurtzman have to pull of in this film is immense: take a film concept greenlit for entirely action and commercial-oriented purposes and legitimize it as much as possible with a plot. Even though it's obvious how hard they try, they deserve props for even making it somewhat feasible. For example, they try and swing it that the discovery of a frozen Megatron in the '30s is responsible for all our modern technology since because they studied how he worked. Hey, it's creative.
The background info, which is given to us outright, is that the Transformers home world of Cybertron was destroyed by Megatron, leader of the Decepticons (bad guys) and the only device capable of creating new Transformer life ended up on Earth -- which no Transformers knew about until the movie started. The Decepticons want the device to create a world for them to rule and the Autobots (good guys) and their leader Optimus Prime want to destroy it so no evil can be done with it. Earthlings, who happen to be caught in the middle, have to suck it up and deal.
Because no film would be any good with just machine characters, Orci and Kurtzman create Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf), your average teenager who gets sucked into the mess because as it happens, his great-grandfather discovered the frozen Megatron. He in turn sucks Mikaela (Megan Fox) into this mess because what fun is a guy running around getting hot and sweaty if he doesn't have an incredible gorgeous woman to get hot and sweaty with? Then there's a supporting cast that is so overkill it's ridiculous: soldiers, computer hackers/defense intelligence people, agents of a secret government branch, the list goes on. All that matters is they make the film barrel on like a flame-emblazoned blue mack truck.
Then there's the attempt at humor, which succeeds when it isn't forced there and comes naturally out of the fact that there are giant robots hanging out in suburbia. Maybe the film's best non-action scene is when the Autobots go to Sam's house to get his grandfather's glasses and they attempt to hide from his parents. Otherwise, the humor is poor because with a film this plot and action driven, it only awkwardly interrupts the flow.
The last mighty effort in the writing is to develop the thematic content. There's the idea of sacrifice and courage that come along with the hero's journey and are meant to please parents forced to take their children, but there's also the underdeveloped but interesting notion of weather humans are worth protecting as the Autobots do. That's rich with potential, but they don't sell us with it. But hey, we'll take the effort, because anything more than incredible visuals is icing on a movie like this.