Very uneven; just barely entertaining

Rating: 2/10 (4 May 2008)

TRANSFORMERS is a long, 'epic' film that unfortunately is an example of what is wrong with a lot of movies nowadays. I just find them very big on special effects, and very small on character development or even entertainment value. And that's the irony b/c it is all these great modern special effects, the CGI type stuff, that is supposed to blow the audience away. But I find it all very distracting and overdone.
TRANSFORMERS has a promising start w/ a prologue describing the longstanding battle between aliens from a faraway planet, the good Autobots and the evil Decepticons and why they must bring their battle to Earth to find a mysterious cube that will affect Earth's future. The action is immediate as a Decepticon advanced party attack force destroys an American military outpost in the Qatar desert, leaving a few surviving soldiers who band together to try to get word to the Pentagon of the impending attack. This group is led by Capt. Lennox (played by modern day hunk Josh Duhamel, who is stuck with a thankless role).
Meanwhile, 2 other parallel stories are told. One is the Pentagon itself who are aware of the Qatar attack, but only have the recording of a strange, foreign signal from the attack to go by. The Defense Secretary (played by Jon Voight who dons an unnecessary Southern accent) musters together a group of expert computer hackers from around the world to decode the signal. The best of these hackers is Maggie Madsen (Australian sexpot Rachael Taylor; is she supposed to be a high school student?!), who quickly figures out that the signal is alien and warns the Secretary of impending attack.
The 3rd parallel story is of the real lead character of the film, high school student Sam Witwicky (played by the engaging young actor Shia LaBeouf, who ironically comes off looking good given the crap dialogue he has to work with; he has such enthusiasm and energy that he draws you in to the story). Sam holds the key to everything as his great, great grandfather was an explorer, one of whose old keepsakes contains the information to the location of the cube. Sam's father buys him a car that turns out to be one of the Autobot transformers who leads Sam to the other Autobots, led by Optimus Prime. Sam also has an assist from his sexy girlfriend Mikaela Banes (played by Megan Fox). I found Sam and Mikaela's story to be the most entertaining, if that means anything. Eventually, all sides (military, government, Sam and his buddy Autobots) come together to try to save Earth.
Unfortunately, the film has several boring and unnecessary scenes and waaaaay too many characters that distract rather than entertain (John Turturro in particular is annoying as a weird government agent that is part of a secret agency that knows something of the impending alien attack and Anthony Anderson just looks bad as 'the best hacker in the world'). Sam's parents are excruciatingly annoying as well, especially the mom who just plain never shuts up. Actually, virtually all of the minor characters are annoying, mostly due to wooden dialogue from a terrible script. Probably every scene in this film has lines that are supposed to be funny, and MAYBE 5%(if that) of the lines in this movie that are supposed to be funny are actually funny. Additionally, of the lines that are NOT supposed to be funny, about 99% of them are so cringe-inducingly bad that they make you go, "Huh! Where'd the hell did that line come from!". This unfortunately is why many big movies now are failures: too much focus on special effects and action and not enough on good scripts and characters. And even the action between the warring robots at the climax is not all that impressive. Oh, and the robots get some pretty bad lines, too. Even they couldn't come out of this mess unscathed.
The film reminds me a lot of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a movie that I will forever despise. But actually, I prefer this film (barely) to ID, maybe b/c I find the leads LaBeouf and Fox both promising and engaging (I pretty much can't stand Will Smith and Bill Pullman was perhaps the WORST portrayal of a U.S. President in any film ever in that movie!) and I find the Transformers aliens to be more interesting than those whatever-the-hell-they-were aliens in ID. Also, I expected more of ID with its more accomplished, well-known cast; but in its own way, ID is much worse than this film, and that's saying something, b/c this 'film' is not good.