Haven't seen a better Transformers movie yet, but not happy about the TF-side story.

Rating: 7/10 (30 December 2007)

If you're a general fan of PG-13 sci-fi thrillers, this movie is very entertaining thanks to its visuals and non-stop action. Another positive side of this movie is the humor abundance.
If you're a fan of the animated series (G1/G2) though, you'll notice some alterations compared to the original concepts. They might be awkward and unpleasant to the classic series fans like me. Here are some of the movie's details I couldn't agree with.
First, there is the all spark cube that gives life to technology. I'm OK with the life giving part, but to technology? Any kind? That's ridiculous. Next, the cube was lost in the universe, and it had to fall down EXACTLY on Earth, as if there could be no other planets out there in the whole universe. Megatron rushed to find it but crash landed in the polar region of Earth. (Ummm, no spacecraft for Megatron was available at that time? Hello, it's Cybertron technology; they're supposedly advanced.) And he froze in the ice, of course, like a human without a fur coat. Then an attack on the army is stricken by a military chopper shaped decepticon, who happens to be piloted by a holographic image of a man with a mustache. I think the same holo-pilot with a mustache sits in the police car decepticon later on. Why was such holographic imagery ultimately needed? Especially, with a mustache. For protection against humans? Autobots soon arrive on Earth, again just like Megatron, without an apparent spacecraft, but as if meteorites instead. Their method of acquiring an "alternate shape mode" is rather magical than scientifically possible by any complex and rationally explainable theory. By scanning a nearby vehicle, their new shape is instantly changed. It's weird, but in cartoons, Megatron had to manually reshape his sports car team in order to turn them into transformable robots. The same goes with Alpha Trion fixing Orion Pax and Ariel, and not waving some magical Harry Potter stick over them to heal them. But here, in the movie, it's done so effortlessly. I never thought that Megatron would accept to be nearly indistinguishable from his "buddy" Starscream, but he was decided to be another jet instead of his ultimate weapon shape. And finally, back to the all spark. Its ability to give life to any kind of technology is probably the most idiotic idea a writer could come up with for this movie. The cube first turned a mobile phone into a psychotic weeny bot with on-board micro weaponry, then later it accidentally sparked a phone booth into another transformer with a readily loaded arsenal. It might as well transform a microwave oven into a robot that pops corn, or worse - a toilet seat that shoots you know what.