Awful

Rating: 1/10 (13 October 2007)

Transformers is basically really awful. Everything about it is bad. Except for the special effects. It's your typical, extremely dumb load of Michael Bay crap that's paced poorly and has a ton of PG-13 explosions for absolutely no point. The vast majority of the movie serves no point, actually. Not that I'm bashing this because it's a Hollywood blockbuster, far from. But Transformers could probably have been about 30 minutes shorter and not suffered in the slightest.
Take the scene where Sam goes back to his house to retrieve his Grandfather's glasses. What should take about nine seconds is instead panned out into some pseudo-slapstick 10 minute scene that tries to be funny, but largely isn't. And why? What does it have to do with anything?
Or the whole hacker sub-plot thing. About five pointless minutes there. Or Sam's friend. We see him for like a minute and a half before Shia ditches him for the girl that tags with him the rest of the movie. Why the hell is he there to begin with? Or the whole 'girl has a juvee record' affair. It's mentioned once, only to be resolved 15 minutes later. OK, great. Wait, why? It has nothing to do with the rest of anything. At all. Then why is it there? And then there's a bunch of other really pointless stuff. I'm pretty sure the "Taco Bell Dog" with the broken paw was there just so the 14-year-old girls in the audience would go 'awwwwwww.' I can fathom no other reason why it is there. The whole eBay thing was nothing more than shameless product-placement in the extreme.
What makes all of this extremely asinine is that the Transformers have absolutely no personality. Instead of developing the real meat of the film, Bay wastes a great deal of time doing what amounts to not a damn thing. Aside from what you learn about them in the first 11 seconds of their being on-screen, the Transformers don't develop or change or show any amount of character at all, which is a real shame. There's Prime, the leader; the one who wants to use his guns all the time; the one who acts black; and Bumblebee. That's how the audience knows them, and all they ever amount to. And the Decepticons are even worse. They're all introduced at the end of the film, only to be defeated. What a menace. Wow. Megatron, who should be the 'harbinger of death,' as Shia puts it, is flat and boring. His reign of terror lasts about 25 minutes. What a character. Just wow.
The final battle, where the movie all comes together, is just wretched. The Transformers fight in a city, which is great for Bay because a lot can be blown up that way. But why do they go to the city to begin with? Because they take the AllSpark, the object the Transformers fight over (logically located beneath Hoover Dam, the safest and most practical of places to hide such a thing) to a city (where you would naturally want killer robots to take their fight to) for 'safekeeping.' Christ.
Anyway, when the Transformers get to fighting, what should be a bombastic and exciting event is instead chopped up by a bunch of really pointless bullet-time and overly-short edits. Aside from when Prime and Megatron fight, you can't tell who's who, and don't care most of the time. The fight never really takes off, let alone gets going.
Oh, other bad things about this movie, before I forget. The acting is bad, the soundtrack is generic, and the screen writing is awful.
On the plus side? The effects are cool. Also, you don't have to think once, unless you question why the hell Micheal Bay thought a discussion about masturbation was needed at all or why Michael Bay is allowed to make moves at all or try to think of a positive aspect of the movie besides the special effects. Then again, you may have to do a lot of thinking.