One of the best movie of the year

Rating: 7/10 (1 August 2007)

Apparently it must be 'in' to flog Hollywood mainstream movies that come out these days, and give them pathetic 1 out of 10 reviews that clearly show that these people know little about how to critically analyse a film or are doing it to irritate the majority of readers looking for a decent, fair review. Normally i would give this movie an 8 but there are a few pretty big flaws in this movies that are blown out of proportion by the 1/10 rating 'OMG OMFG worst movie ever' idiots.
GOOD> Good things are the acting, Shia and Megan show chemistry and at times OK humour especially when bumblebee tries to, ahem... help things along. That was a nice little touch. The transformers themselves in terms of effects and changes are as fantastic as you can imagine. The transformer battles are epic as hell and thats where bay's editing shines, lots of wide angle slow motion shots when the shooting breaks out and plenty of hard hitting chaotic close quarter combat when they stand toe to toe. The script well written especially for the humour but there are clearly some missing scenes that were taken out of the final edit. Despite this there is plenty of good dialogue, if you can see past the cartoonish bellowing of the transformers, but hey who the hell are you to tell me how alien robots from outer-space talk?
BAD> Cuts are painfully visible, you can tell from the jumpy edits and 'out of nowhere' dialogue. This is a long movie as it is though so i don't blame them for the obvious cuts however they are sloppily done. Josh Duhammel and his platoon were a waste of screen time, (their acting wasn't bad, they were just not needed in the plot!) They could have completely written them out and still could have tied the plot together relatively easily and given more development to the protagonists. Their presence in the film could even raise questions about political pressure on the film to involve military hero figures to subliminally boost troop support in Iraq, its only a guess though don't hold me on that one.
OVERALL> Despite these few niggles i have with the film it still delivers, the dialogue from the Transformers is mad and OTT but thats a good thing, they are meant to be larger than life and have to ring true to their original source cartoon characters, if you keep changing the source material to be more 'cinematic' we may have ended up with another Doom. The action is top notch, Shia carries the film competently as the protagonist, effects are excellent, soundtrack and music do the jobs they are meant to do in context with the mood of the scenes and even though there is some dodgy editing due to cuts and some unnecessary characters the film is still vastly enjoyable to hardcore fans of the old series and newcomers alike. Anyone who rates this movie under 3/10 without giving solid reasons why, i pity you...