A little bit more than meets the eye...

Rating: 8/10 (27 June 2007)

This is a pretty decent action flick. Yes, it's mindless exhilaration, but what more do you honestly expect from a movie based on toys? Anyone looking for some in-depth, character-driven drama is probably going to be out of luck. That is not to say the humans in this film are totally worthless. Quite the opposite, actually. The two leads (Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky and Megan Fox as Mikaela) help ground the film (as much as a film about robots disguised as vehicles can be). I didn't find the two of them the least bit annoying (which is always the danger with these sorts of movies, where no one's really interested in the human characters, they're more interested in the big CGI creations). Thank goodness the film has these two actors. I thought they did an admirable job of keeping us interested in the storyline when the focus was shifted from the Transformers back to the humans.
The first half of the film has quite a delightful sense of humour to it. Sam is a decent guy. Not in that irritating goodie-two-shoes kind of way, just a regular everyday type who people can relate to. He's a believable character and doesn't camp it up. Mikaela is not the usual run-of-the-mill damsel-in-distress either. Like the robots in this film, there's more to Mikaela than meets the eye. Her character proves to be quite resourceful and not just a pretty face. If these two lead characters had been a failure and miscast, the movie would have been extremely dismal. Thankfully, that is not the case. A lot of the humour in the film comes from Sam and his beaten up Camaro (Bumblebee), that he purchases as his first car. To go into detail about all the humorous bits would ruin the fun, but suffice to say, there's no shortage of comical moments (fully *intentional*, of course) in this film. Even Sam's parents get a few laughs.
The other humans? Eh, you could take them or leave them. They're not cardboard cutouts or anything, but neither are they as well-developed as the two main characters. The Transformers themselves tend to vary in how effective they are on screen. The evil Decepticons don't get much to say/do. Though they *do* get to trash lots of stuff (which, I guess, is what Decepticons do best). Their leader, Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving - not that you can really tell it's him) isn't in the film as much as some might have hoped. The Autobots, however, get a good deal more screen time. They're far more developed and actually have personalities. The most memorable, of course, being their leader (Optimus Prime - voiced by Peter Cullen). Though there have been considerable alterations made to the appearances of the Transformers, they still look good on film. You certainly believe that vehicles can turn into giant robots, when watching this movie. The CGI is indeed impressive. It's just too bad that the editing in the action scenes is all over the place, making it extremely hard to tell what's going on.
At first glance, this film appears to be nothing more than a fun roller-coaster ride of action and robots blowing stuff up. There's actually a bit more to it than that, if you look closely, and this is the reason why I found the film to be successful.