rubbish!

Rating: 1/10 (29 July 2007)

I was a massive Transformers fan when I was a kid, and I've been waiting for a big budget adaptation ever since I saw Jurassic Park and realised it could be possible.
I watched the film last night, and I was glad to see that Bumblebee, one of the integral characters, was yellow. Unfortunately everything else (with the exception of a couple of randomly used names) had changed.
The story was overly simplistic, ugly, and made no sense, and the Transformers were overly complicated, ugly, and made no sense.
The robots all look the same, and there was no character development, which is a pity because it was the individuality of the characters that made the original concept so enjoyable.
The design of the robots themselves bore no relation to the much loved look of the originals. One robot, who I think was meant to be Frenzy, looked more like some kind of stainless steel multiple egg whisking contraption than the stocky humanoid warrior of yore. There was also some kind of giant scorpion robot that I don't think was ever properly explained. Megatron, the iconic bucket headed leader of the Decepticons is now an indistinguishable metal mess.
There are so many human characters in this film that I think they're each given approximately 30 seconds of screen time to tell their stories. The soldiers? Pointless. The computer geeks? Unnecessary. The Secretary of Defence? Waste of a good actor.
A terrible film. Could've been good. But then, so could've Pearl Harbour.