More Than Meets The Eye

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2007)

In all honesty I never liked Transformers. I never watched the old cartoon. I got a few toys as birthday gifts but I never had the patience to make them fully 'transform'. The only attachment I really have with Tranformers is the old Beast Wars show, but that was only if nothing else was on.
But I loved this movie.
It's not perfect (it's a summer movie), but it's a rare summer movie that can beat you in the face with it's action sequences and still remain memorable. In all honesty it's a film that only Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg could make properly. Yeah the story isn't great, and the characters are underdeveloped, but it sticks to you anyway. And, really, when was the last time we saw a truly amazing huge-friggin'-robots movie? In my opinion Transformers is the best summer film of 2007, trouncing even my once-personal favourite 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. Michael Bay said he wanted to create a sort of 'family film with an edge' and that's more or less what this is. I can't imagine all the complaints he must have gotten when people were first introduced to the 'serious look' of a children's toy line. But that's really what it is. If your hoping for a scene where a Decepticon transforms, crushing a hapless human inside it's many moving parts, you'll be very disappointed. The violence mostly comes from the robot-on-robot battles, with relatively few on screen human casualties. The film itself is like the toys it is based off. You look at it and wonder how it's supposed to work, but in the end it just does, and it does it well.