Ruined by inexplicably bad directing and full of horrible and tedious pop culture moments

Rating: 3/10 (23 August 2007)

Having never watched the Transformers cartoons in the 80's I'm no fanboy, but I remember as a boy the Transformer toys and the cool autobot/decepticon logos. With very little info about the film but aware of the relatively high votes this had received from IMDb users, I went to the cinema expecting to see, for once a quality 'summer blockbuster'.Just before walking in I saw a flyer about the film and it mentioned the director being Michael Bay who directed 'Armageddon' and 'Pearl Harbour'.....and I thought 'Oh-oh, this could be a terrible omen for the movie I was about to see'
After about 15-20 minutes, my respect for the movie was already in danger of dissipating and had already lost 2 points out of 10 vote-wise. Why? Teenagers.... nauseating adolescents with raging hormones and big mouths on screen trying to look cool, meanwhile soldiers on the other side of the world...annoying grunts are trying to be macho and blurting out banal lines, one of them talks to himself in Spanish, another blurts out 'Speak in English'- 'its my heritage, man' he responds, another mentions the wife and baby 'waiting for him back home' -cliché -whom they cut to in one of many completely unnecessary scenes that punctuate this flick. Pentagon officials and other 'hangers-on' walking around being extremely important, 'Mr President' blah blah-how many times do we see this in Hollywood movies! And the film takes the audience from one scene to the next- no story, no introduction, no relevance. Later the film relies on Optimus Prime narrating the backdrop to the story when Megatron first landed on Earth in the last century....why couldn't they have started with this instead?
The casting for the main characters and their initial interactions on screen were terrible! We have this so annoying highly-strung teenage boy who's obsessed with a girl (she's just there for eye candy) and the audience have to endure SO MANY sexualised gratuitous camera shots of him checking her out, shots of her cleavage and derriere and close-up shots of her face taking up the whole screen- Michael Bay seemed to have a personal fixation with her! I was thinking 'I've come to see Transformers, if I want to watch a bunch of teenagers talking garbage, ogling over each other and planning how they are going to get laid, I'll just rent 'American Pie' on DVD.-Be warned, I am not joking- there are some excruciatingly bad and out-of-place scenes for this genre of film. The long farcical scene at the boy's house that has got to be one of the worst I have seen for a long time in a big-budget movie, where all the Transformers are outside 'hiding' with a silly conversation taking place between the boy and his parents in his bedroom and where a reference to 'Masturbation' is made not once, but about 3 times!!! Can you believe it? Everyone in the cinema cringed in embarrassment thanks to this piece of crass and gratuitous directing. I felt for the parents who went with their kids (this was a 12 certificate) and who probably came out with that one line ringing in their ears with little Johnny asking them what masturbate means. Then you get the secret services turning up at the house, with John Turturro doing almost a parody of an FBI agent- he is later stripped to his underwear and handcuffed to a street lamp post in another ridiculous scene (I kid you not!) Why the pathetic attempt to inject moments of humour and the rubbish one-liners? Just cut it out- as most of it fell flat on it's face. Check the scene, when the autobot comes out of the back-garden swimming pool with the little girl standing there...the camera closes in on her for the inevitable one-liner.... I thought- 'no don't do it'....as she says 'Are you the tooth fairy?' - Christ...knock another point off. Btw- no-one laughed in the theatre.
The teenagers were so irritating that killing them off would have been a highlight, and what was with the totally irrelevant sub-plot about the girl having a criminal record? Who cares?!!Two other wastes of space are the Pentagon code analyser (who comes across as just some young Australian model who's there as eye-candy number two) and her 'In Da Hood hysterical fat Hacker friend' (of course such natural sidekicks). An old Jon Voight is pasted in here as a Defense Secretary in attempt to add some credibility to it all, but he comes across as worn and tired. Other cringe-making moments: Optimus Prime refers to the 'WWW and E-bay', violin music playing during a silly emotional-meant scene between the boy-hero and autobot Bumblebee who's been partially destroyed, fat hacker from 'da hood' freaks out in the FBI interrogation room, rock music inexplicably accompanying some of the action sequences, a soldier trying to phone in air support is connected to some nerdy type call centre worker in India! Absolutely disgraceful and I would have laughed if I hadn't forked out money to watch this.
On the only positive note the action sequences are spectacular and the special effects are top class, especially the way the autobots/decepticons transform during their battles. I give all 3 points for this alone. I wasn't too sure about the way Megatron was portrayed though, as he didn't appear to be true to the version I remember from the 80's- his design looked too insect-like and he talked like that tree character from Lord of the Rings. The only redeeming parts of the film are when the Transformers are on screen and it's a shame the film doesn't focus on them more as they far outshine the human characters in this extremely disappointing and tatty film.