Shia saved this movie from being a TOTAL piece of sh*t

Rating: 2/10 (19 November 2007)

Initially, I saw the teaser for this, somewhat intrigued at the idea of a 'Transformers' movie, though I had never seen the cartoons before. At least, I WAS excited...until I saw the words 'A Michael Bay Film'. That brought me back down to earth...
...but THEN something distinct occurred when I saw the extended trailer: I was actually surprised by what I saw, and I thought, 'Maybe Steven Spielberg was all that Michael Bay needed...'
Well, opening night, after working a long shift at work and hoping to relax at home, my roommate surprised me with my ticket, and off we went.
Well, sorry to say that the term 'What you see is what you get' most certainly didn't apply to this movie. Nobody informed me that I would be subjected to alien cyborgs prone to surprisingly-good earthling pop-culture lingo and urinary pranks. And it wasn't that I was put off by the complete misinterpretation of the title characters; it was the fact that, about forty-five minutes into the movie, I was just bored with what I was seeing. With the exception of Shia LeBaouf, nothing impressed me about this movie. And given Michael Bay's penchant for making movies twice as long as they should be, I knew I had another hour and forty-five minutes left to go.
First of all, the incident in the Middle East: A) didn't need to be there in the first place, or B) if you do include it, show the Decepticon wiping out the entire base with no survivors. That's right, you most definitely don't need Tyrese and Josh Duhamel in this movie, they don't enhance anything. All this is made worse by the fact that they conveniently find themselves fighting these things at the end of the movie, which I'm sure is exactly what they want to do is fight things they could barely predict in the desert...
And if they were dead weight, I can't even begin to describe what that would make the hot Australian hacker chick and her friend, who besides being a fellow hacker is her complete opposite (and played by Anthony 'stuck in fat black comic relief role for life' Anderson). This was a subplot that had ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING ON THE STORY WHATSOEVER, if only so Michael Bay could turn to his friends and say, 'I can get Anthony Anderson and hot Australian chicks in my movie'. Well, maybe you've got a slight edge on me, Mr. Bay, but if I had that ability, I reckon I could find a better way to utilize them in the ACTUAL STORY! (By the way, did I mention that there is a hacker played by a hot Australian chick? Yeah, that's believable...)
Now, about the ACTUAL STORY itself: Kid wants a car to impress babes in badly, ends up igniting the battle between Autobots and Decepticons in the fight for the power of the Cube. All the previous things considering, that's not TOO bad. And hell, if it weren't for Shia, this might have been the first movie I ever would've walked out on. He was unquestionably good, and his improvisation is amongst the best I've seen.
With that said, the least that Spielberg could've done, as executive producer, was find a competent writing staff. Now, yes, I have NOT seen the cartoons, but that doesn't necessarily mean I don't know the story. Hell, it isn't hard. My issue with the story wasn't with the main story, as muddled as it became at the end (and that last half hour was a mishmash of bad cinematography and editing that I couldn't decipher to save my life). My issues were with the two other story lines mentioned before that had no real reason to be there in the first place, and the extremely crappy dialogue. I've lived in Florida, and there are products of the Florida educational system that could've written this a lot better that it was.
Really, the only three positives about this movie:
A) Shia LeBaouf B) The special effects (at least, when you could tell what the hell was going on) C) It isn't the MOST boring and disappointing movie of the summer (congrats to 'Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer' for that award)