Don't take it seriously it's just fun!!!

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2014)

I wasn't going to watch this film because it sounded like such a cheesy cash-in of all the other comic book and 80s cartoon revival films going around. Which technically it was. I'd heard it was a no-brainer with great special effects. Luckily I love enormous CGI, and someone else had bought it so I watched it for the hell of it. And loved it!
I wasn't disappointed by the visual effects - they are tremendous! So good, in fact, that the detail sometimes makes the fight scenes confusing - more so than watching LOTR The Two Towers from the front row of the cinema! But why I enjoyed it so much wasn't down to the graphics, but the dialogue - shocking but true. It's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen which in no way professed to be a comedy! For starters, one of the Transformers is a bright yellow Chevrolet sent to protect our young Shia LaBeouf - though apparently not from getting laid! I hadn't realised the Transformers came to Earth in order to become match-makers. Anyone ever tell them three's a crowd?
OK, I was initially right and this is a completely formulaic story wrapped around a load of mouldy cheese; an old plot rehashed and straining for some kind of deep and meaningful backstory - at least in any scenes involving the Autobots and Decepticons (see how I was paying attention?). As long as the robots don't talk, you've got a great movie. Really. The dialogue was cringe-inducing, but only from the Transformers themselves. The human characters were fine. Better than fine. Bloody well funny, I say!
Also a little note about how styles of acting change over the years: Look back at a film from the 1930s and you'd be forgiven for thinking it a little OTT. (But they all came from the theatre, so we can forgive them.) More recently - and as this film seems to show - we're getting into the truly "natural" side of acting, where people DO talk over the top of each other when arguing, or joking, or simply behaving as normal people do. In reality people don't wait for one person to stop talking before saying something - that is truly reading lines from a set script. But I think actors are now trying to sound genuine on screen.
However, It doesn't always work, sometimes it's confusing and distorted unless you have an ear for it. I'm putting this in as a warning, because I watched this with my mum and dad and got different reactions. Dad was fine - thought it was hysterical and loved the explosions. Boom boom. But my mother struggled with everything, and in the end believed she must be entirely out of touch with the world because they seemed to be speaking a different language to her. I suggested she was just old and going deaf as well as not being down with the kids. She told me to get stuffed. But anyway, just a warning in case you have that era problem where you can't discern one voice from a crowd: the party-effect, or whatever.
But for anyone else - as long as you don't take the film seriously, you'll enjoy it emmensely. Forget the awful moral message delivered by the robots and just giggle your socks off!