More than meets the eye? The film is EXACTLY what it appears to be

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2007)

Transformers - Sam Witwicky (name alone tells you how seriously they took the subject matter) finds an old Camero that uses some Herbie and Nightrider tricks in the hope of getting Sam laid by no-way-in-he11-is-she-in-high-school Mikaela Bane (Megan Fox). It turns out the weird car is *gasp* a ROBOT IN DISGUISE! by the name of Bumblebee. The robot sends out a signal to the coolest Autobot (Good guy for short) ever and step-father to a generation of small boys in the 80s, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen).
Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving and he11 if I could've figured out it was him, and I loved V for Vendetta) is on Earth and is after a cube. Why? That's not important right now. He's a Decepticon, and if you can't keep them straight it's in the bloody name. DECEPT-icon. Like deception= bad guy. Oh who gives a crap. Look the point is that there are some wonderfully intense robot on robot action sequences. Crap gets blown up. And I hate Bay, but he sure can blow things up.
Transformers is quite possibly the dumbest movie that you may find this summer. Parts of it may also be the most fun you'll have at the cinema this year. Hence I'm torn about this movie.
The music keeps telling you otherwise, but huge chunks of dialog in this film are jarringly awful. Nearly everything is played for laughs. And there are plot holes galore with no logic save action movie logic. Every minute the robots are not on screen is a moment wasted. The script felt like a couple of teenage boys just willed for the coolest stuff to happen in their own alternate universe.
"I only got a B- on a project where all I did was hock my granddad's crap for 3 minutes? I can convince my teacher to raise it to an A-."
"The coolest girl in the class? Yeah. She's on Maxim's top 100 Hottest Women list, and nevermind her popular asshole boyfriend and my awful attempts at wooing her. She's going to like me eventually, and (I sh!t you not, this actually happens) sit on my lap, just because the movie says so." Yeah right toy-boy. In your dreams.
The film almost has a mad brilliance to it. It's like Bay knows we'll stomach these laughably tired things he does for the sake of those f***ing awesome robots.
Boy does he know us well. Hook, line, and sinker. Those robots are enormous, kick @ss, and were money well spent. I could watch them transform into robots and back over and over and never get bored. There's one that's a tank, there are two awesome jets. There's even one that's a Mountain Dew machine in perhaps the most shameless product placement in cinema history. A minor problem I had though was that it was kind of hard to tell who was who sometimes. Megatron and Starscream kinda looked alike at a glance. Fans of the series will be mixed on the whole because the robots WERE awesome and true (for the most part) to the series they love so well. It's the humans that gum up the works.
Jon Voight plays perhaps the most inept Secretary of Defense I've ever seen. John Tuturro is kinda ineffective, kinda creepy, kinda lame. Where was the menace I saw in "O Brother Where Art Thou" and "Secret Window"? Anthony Anderson continues down the pathway of "Chubby Comic Relief" hell. Shia LaBeouf is alright as the awkward protagonist. It's mostly this god-awful script that the cast has to deal with. Nearly everything is played for laughs. The robots are fine for the most part. Megatron and his Decpeticons ooze menace and Prime is fatherly and the Autobots are likable. It's just shame that the film didn't center around them.
The movie was made for the big screen, and will be worthless by the time the DVD scrolls around, so see it now, not then. Bay is still a hack, but he shore done made them robots and explosions purdy and will doubtless make a bundle from this very fun, astronomically flawed movie.
I give Transformers a B-. Oh, and did I mention how cool the Transformers are?