The Robots Were Astonishingly Bland

Rating: 3/10 (15 September 2010)

I found myself liking the first third of Transformers and being completely disengaged with the film after that.
I think that the best choice Michael Bay has made in his entire film career was putting Shia LaBeouf in the lead role of this film. I'm not going to swear to this, but I felt like he was improvising at least half of his dialogue. Which is great, because the screenplay was not very interesting at all. I found myself enjoying everything that LaBeouf's characters said more than any other part of the movie. He's funny, quirky, and, surprisingly, a decent actor. I first saw his work in Holes and then again in Disturbia. I must say that I feel like LaBeouf is on his way to making some really excellent work in the future.
Megan Fox, on the other hand, was less than satisfying. Everyone has been talking about how pretty she is and, yes, I think that's the only reason she was in the film. Her character was completely unnecessary to the story and could have been taken out entirely. But, instead, the audience gets about a thousand shots of her "looking hot" and very few shots of her actually doing anything important with the story. Still, even though I don't think she's a very good actress, I had to admit that her acting was still much better than Liv Tyler's in Armageddon or Kate Beckinsale's in Pearl Harbor. She's not a *bad* actress, but she doesn't offer any meat to the story beyond being a love interest for LaBeouf's character.
As for the character development in general, I didn't see any. Unsurprisingly. I didn't expect any, and I didn't get any. But, here's my biggest issue with that: these robots should be interesting. But they aren't. These robots probably make up for most of my criticism with this film. The special effects were really good (*really* good), but the robots were astonishingly bland. And I thought they looked ugly. Believe it or not, I thought there was *too* *much* detail to them. There were so many chunks of metal sticking off of them that it made them all hard to recognize. Yes, that was a big complaint I had with the film. Except for two of the robots, they all looked the same! I had no idea what robots I should be rooting for during the fight scenes. I felt like they all were Megatron fighting Megatron. The only two robots I could recognize were the yellow one and Optimus Prime. And that's only because they were different colors from the other robots. I mean, this was not a very good-*looking* film. That surprised me, because Bay's films are at least fairly decent with the art direction, but not here. The colors were too saturated in some places, but not when it came to the robots. And, like I said, all the robots looked the same to me.
And I wasn't very impressed with the action sequences either. I felt like there wasn't enough coherence to it. It was a lot of stomping around and not a whole lot of anything else. And the action starts about halfway through the movie and doesn't stop until the film's over. The rest of the characters in this movie, apart from LaBeouf and the robots, didn't really serve a purpose for the story. There were a few characters who I didn't even know why they were getting screen time. The movie dips in and out of the main plot line at a ridiculous rate. There's an interrogation scene for two characters. I was confused because I had no idea what purpose they were serving. I didn't know why the scene was even in the film.
If I had to sum up Transformers, it would be that there was a lot of decent effects surrounding incoherent action sequences, ugly robots that looked the same, useless characters, little plot, cheap dialogue, and not much else. This is Michael Bay's best film, but that's not saying much since I hated his other films.
3/10