Decent, but weighed down by a sloppy script and humans

Rating: 7/10 (3 July 2007)

We all knew the Transformers would be well made, well crafted creatures due to the utter genius that is Industrial Light and Maghic. But its too bad the human element was what bogged this movie down.
Sure, we'll watch the movie, but there was just too much exposition and for us impatient, Ritalin-riddled miscreants of the world, it was excruciating. First of all, the script was pretty lousy. Now I know the guy who wrote this film supposedly wrote X-Men, but lets face it, that was a good seven years ago. There were plenty of things that could have been chopped out of this film. Now I understand the producers wanted to get a little titillation with Raechel Taylor and Megan Fox, but they were both dead weights to the movie and the movement. Without those two, we could get rid of Anthony Anderson, another waste of words, and maybe even expand Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson's roles. Either way, the female element in the film was completely useless. Let's face it, guys watched this cartoon growing up, and we want action, violence and lots of transforming. Who fricking cares if Shia LeBouf's character gets some action. Its completely irrelevant. It would have also been nice to see some conflict between Megatron and Starscream.
The only other thing I didn't like was the awful soundtrack. The strings portion of the film was pretty substandard, borrowing the most generic themes one could possibly imagine. Then there is the random songs and generic heavy metal they try to slip in. It was like the people who mixed the film took a lesson from the dopes that mixed Daredevil, which had an equally awful mixture of CD sales-friendly mixing.
But I digress. For those that had doubts about the transforming, it was put to rest rather quickly. Dazzling to say the least, it was as realistic as one could have hoped for, making the transformations rather cool. ILM must have put their best and brightest on this movie, because it certainly shows. This brilliance alone made up for the bad exposition and substandard characters.
I gave this film a "7" simply because it was entertaining, but they are gonna have to tighten up the screws for future sequels. People won't put up with unnecessary characters and bad music for very long.