worse than expected

Rating: 3/10 (20 June 2009)

Yes, it's a Michael Bay film and so to expect anything else than lots of explosions, special effects, cultural ignorance, borderline racism and a big military showreel would be hypocritical. And I'm not going to criticise the plot either, because, clearly the film was not intended to have one. There is just enough dialoge to stitch the various battle scenes together and that's it. Continuity comes down to keeping the same characters throughout the film and having them say variations of their four or five different lines over and over again, and you know what, its fine, because the film doesn't try to be more than that. After all, this is a life action version of a cheap cartoon show inspired by a toy commercial. Hey, Michael Bay would have been my first choice too!
I was getting annoyed by the frequent use of words like "destiny" and "purpose" and all that, but its not Transformer's fault. Every second Hollywood movie has it by now and I was already tired of it by the time Matrix Reloaded came out.
There is some true potential for comedy here, snappy, fast shot dialogue, and little side stories that are cut together and overlaid in a very fast and exciting fashion. Typical for Michael Bay and something that worked well in movies like Bad Boys II. Too bad they all boil down to some character bumping her head or something, oh well.
What I was expecting were stunning visual effects and a big, thoroughly directed action spectacle and in that respect I felt rather disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I have to give Bay credit for being able to insert an action driven sequence in five minute intervals, and I'm not being cynical! If you love big explosions, there are few films that can reach this sort of action density.
It's fun, but it's also way too uniform. From the first opening battle with some huge unicycle robot to the last fight in the desert there is little or no dramatisation, no structure to keep me interested.
For instance, the robot's agility and strength are in no comparison to the little human soldiers with their petty machineguns, so having humans fight robots for more than 20 minutes without them getting ripped into little fleshy pieces just seems odd and therefore drains a lot of suspense out of the action.
The Explosions are repetitive and especially the final battle seemed to go on forever. The camera feels detached and inconsistent, which is sad because some sequences had some really great camera work in them but they are short moments and are easy to miss.
Even the visual effects on the robots weren't all that impressive. I would have actually liked to see some robots TRANSFORM but even that wasn't possible most of the time. I'm sure a lot of effort has been put in building and animating these characters but apart from two or three scenes none of the transformations can actually be seen!!?! Either the camera swoops around so there's too much motion blur, or it's just a close-up where you can only see some random metal parts fly by, or the shot is cut early, or the transformation is actually purposely hidden behind some cleverly placed obstacle (parachute!!!).
Kudos to the production team, it's a technical masterpiece. Still, despite all the effort, it left me somewhat unsatisfied. I rate it 3 out of ten because, sadly, it's not what I'd consider a great action film. Transformers 3 will probably be better than this but I won't be going.