Glitzy junk - and not for little kids

Rating: 5/10 (28 June 2009)

...and if we had stayed for the whole movie, I'd probably be saying too damn long. Took my four year old to this because he loves transformers. He could take a little over an hour and a half and that was about my limit also. Some of the computer generation is well done, BUT 1) you also need interesting plot and characters (the autobots outshine any person here), and 2) this quick-cut music-video directing style during the battle sequences makes it impossible for me to figure out in the least what is happening. I can't imagine my four year old getting it either. Maybe the quick and constant cutting is done to mask some other problem with computer-generated graphics, I don't know, but whatever its reason it really does not work. And besides which, wasn't Michael Bay the guy asking if they could take their "brewskis" to the basement in Mystery Men?
Hard to figure the target audience for this - the language is above smaller kids, but there ain't much for adults either so I guess it's whatever's in between. This movie reminds me of the decline of computer gaming in the 90s -- when better graphics became available the actual games themselves became much less compelling. This seems like a waste of a lot of people's efforts.