Quite pleasantly surprised

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2007)

When I first saw the teaser trailers a year ago, I had reservations. A mecha live action movie with big Hollywood production? I could so easily see that being ruined by Hollywood executives. So I went into this movie with no expectations or hopes, which may account for my high rating. For the record I was a casual fan of the original TV series, and never followed the various offshoots like Beastwars etc etc.
For starters the transformations are a marvel and truly fun to see for all the different robots. The transformations never comes off artificial or cartoonish like The Hulk movie disaster was. And the action whether it was between Autobots and Decepticons or against humans is well done and quite suspenseful in some instances, though some of the slow motion parts seems to be hashed from 300. Nevertheless, I found it fairly entertaining and a welcome break from the huge plethora of CGI kiddy movies we are being inundated with nowadays, so it's refreshing to see what was essentially a cartoon given a serious treatment and look. There is violence and death in the movie of both humans and Transformers, though I privately wished there was more gore in it.
Of course there are flaws. A bit too much time is spent on the romantic development between the human characters. This results in some of the Autobot interaction seeming out of place and hard to relate to. Indeed, I did not find myself grieving much over the demise of some Transformers. I think more time should have been spent on the character development of the Transformers, especially the rivalry between Optimus Prime and Megatron.
All in all, I am quite impressed and satisfied with the movie and hope that a sequel is in the works, and that the sequel will have more gore and action and not get it's violence watered down like Die Hard 4.0.