Grown up CGI with a little kids script

Rating: 6/10 (5 July 2007)

I'm an 80s kid and almost everybody I know was excited about this movie coming out. Who doesn't love giant fighting robots? Michael Bay's website has an awesome t-shirt available, it's black and says on the front "Giant F-king Robots are Coming." A movie like that doesn't even really need a script.
What it needs is one single minded direction in all aspects of all movie production and promotion. Based on what I saw from the previews, I thought it was going to be a revamp of a cartoon, shooting for the 13-31 male demographic with lots of action to boot. With that it mind it did an excellent job updating the look of the transformers and the way they fought to satisfy anybody with "OMG Giant Fighting Robots" in mind when they walked into the theater.
However, as I was enjoying this movie I kept on being slammed back to earth by unnatural dialog, weak character motivations, and a superficial character arc. Some of the scenes stuck me as odd and conflicting while watching it, but it didn't hit me until afterwards that the script wasn't bad, it was just meant for kids. If you're looking for the next Terminator 2 this isn't it. Every character has one purpose and is obviously striving to get it once it has been narrated to the audience. This is summed up perfectly when Sam (Shia) says "Okay, I got a car, now all I need is a girl" or something to that effect.
I have also heard people complain about John Turturro's character pointlessness within the movie and must agree that he is pointless within a "grown-ups" script. Almost every single kids movie has some good character in authority who impedes progress of the protagonist for really no reason and eventually comes around. It is someone that needs no explanation to kids because they already know what's gonna happen and what that character is about even though it made me feel unsatisfied.
Same thing can be said about robot hiding scene. The silly humor there in definitely reminds me of characters in an animated children's film, especially so with the "lubricating" scene. While the scene is overly long for my tastes it would be an important scene in a kids script helping them to identify who are good guys and bad guys almost immediately.
This movie is not bad, and definitely has some action sequences worth seeing on a bigger screen. If you're looking for well polished script that has intriguing characters to back up that action you'll find it lacking. I gave it a 6/10 for what I was expecting, though I think if it had been pitched as more of a kids movie through the trailer and buzz I would have been able to overlook what I didn't and enjoyed it more.