Transformers themselves were awesome, but the movie was terrible!

Rating: 4/10 (20 July 2007)

Saw this last night and my childhood dreams of 20 years were partially fulfilled, but overall I was quite disappointed.
Now, on the plus side, the Transformers were perhaps the best CGI I've ever seen in a movie. Period. I don't see how the filmmakers could possibly have done a better job in bringing the Transformers to life on the big screen. Add in some terrific sound effects, and you can actually feel the mass of the robots as they move across the screen. The battle sequences are some of the best sci-fi action scenes that you'll ever see. Acting was good, for the most part, and the comedy had its moments.
However, I felt that this movie spent too much time on the human characters and not enough time on the Transformers themselves. They simply tried packing in too many human characters with separate story lines that introducing us to all of them pushed back the arrival of the Autobots to nearly halfway through the movie. And, as a direct consequence, the robots get very little time for character development. Prime and Bumblebee are the only two who actually get personal attention. We learn enough about Megatron from what others say about him, but none of the other Decepticons (not even Starscream) gets more than a couple of lines of dialog.
I could write pages and pages about how bad a director I think Michael Bay is, but I'll try to be brief. Basically, Bay would make a great Assistant Director in charge of just the action scenes of any of his movies, because he certainly has a flair for cinematic fireworks. But when it comes to telling a coherent story with three-dimensional characters, Bay is one of the worst directors in the history of film. Enough of that though; everyone knows why so many people hate Michael Bay. I'll just say that this film suffers from all of those same reasons.
I gave this movie four stars, because while the Transformers themselves were spectacular, they happened to be featured in a very poorly written movie. I'm really not looking forward to the sequel unless they can find a director who takes his movies seriously.