Great graphics, but everything else falls far short

Rating: 3/10 (24 June 2009)

I should know better than to expect different from Michael Bay, but I decided to give this movie a shot. First off, clocking in at over 2 hours of playtime, the movie is considerably long. However, in the entire movie, they manage to shove in as many overdone scenes as they could manage to fit in, and the whole movie is apparently intended to be nothing but continual action. The story had major events happen extremely quick and were clouded out by "everything else" that they had in it (i.e. explosions, massive fight scenes with unnamed and forgettable characters, so on).
First and foremost, I want to know the audience they were shooting for. Many of their humorous moments were extremely overdone and were questionable for why they would be put into the movie. Two dogs start humping out of nowhere...twice. The massive Decepticon is for some reason given a pair of metal "testicals" (wrecking balls from a construction vehicle). The mother getting high on pot brownies and proceeding to make an ass of herself for no reason. The jokes were extremely childish and way out of place, but at the same time were definitely unnecessary for any child to see. In fact, about 90% of the movies humor is through blatant sexuality, and again...most times for no good reason.
Beyond that, the many overused, overdone scenes that just make you cringe keep popping up. The "say you love me" "I don't want to yet" stuff got old right off the bat. The mother being extremely clingy. My favorite has to be something I have seen so many times and it continues to make me face-palm...the "You have to let me go, dad!" scenes, where the kid has to save the world or whatever, and the dad doesn't want to let him, so he screams "you have to let me go!" until the dad breaks down and gives in. It's no longer moving or meaningful after excessive use. War of the Worlds did the same thing and it was just as bad.
The plot was extremely basic but took so long to happen, and was even harder to enjoy with the gratuitous amounts of overdone and at times unnecessary action sequences. 2 minutes of plot advancement, then 20-30 minutes of fight and action scenes, rinse and repeat. Many unknowns are killed off rather easily, even the massive one near the end (not spoiling, you'll see if you haven't). At the end, you feel like the story wasn't that important, and while it could have been much better, it falls far short.
The only saving grace has to be the graphics...this definitely had to be a difficult film for the animators due to the massive amount of CGI needing to be done. Still, many scenes are so quick moving that you can't really marvel at the detail put into the characters. Most of it looks messy and disorganized at times. It was large amounts of work, which looks impressive at a distance, but looking closer you pick up on how it feels like no deep detail was done on the bots, and a lot of things feel thrown together.
So, all in all, surprised as hell this movie stands at a 7.5 right now, I expect that to go down significantly, but I agree with a line from a great song..."Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?" Very disappointed, and so were many of the people that went to see the movie with me.