Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye

Two things to start. First, I legitimately enjoyed Transformers. Second, I'm sorry for the title, but it's almost a necessity given the situation. Onto the meat...

Transformers is exactly what everybody else has been saying: A fun pop-corn movie and an amazing overall spectacle. I would say small on the plot, but it tries to have a more elaborate plot than it needed to, and that's really its failings. It's an immensely entertaining film filled with explosions and giant robots, but if you go in without a preexisting appreciation for said robots, the fun isn't nearly as infectious.

Bumblebee is the only Autobot that the viewer will have any inclination towards liking based solely on the material in the film. And if Bay hadn't made the obvious choice of casting Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, even transformers aficionados would be lacking the much needed emotional connection to this important canonical figure.

That's the real problem with Transformers, and since the good parts are fairly obvious, that's what I'm going to devote what little I have left to say too. Bay spends far too much time setting up the plot lines for the human characters and not enough time on the Transformers themselves; especially considering that almost all of the human plot line is devoted towards explaining how the humans can fight the Decepticons in the closing minutes of the film. Sure, Shia LaBeouf is a great young actor and he deserves screen time, but certainly not at the expense of the titular characters.

That LaBeouf's plot line didn't even need to be reduced to improve the end result is even sadder. The other two concurrent plot threads could have been completely replaced with more Autobot and (especially) Decepticon related story and improved the movie significantly. If Michael Bay didn't feel he had to whore out his military connections at every opportunity, not only would there have been easily an extra 40 minutes to flesh out both sides of the Transfomers crew, but the final showdown would have been much more climactic. Human intervention greatly detracted from the grandeur of Autobot on Decepticon action, especially in the case of the showdown between (a woefully under addressed) Megatron and Prime.

The worse offender, though, is the entirely unnecessary "signal analyst" plot line. All that these guys did that affected the ending in any way was tell the Air Force where to go at the end, and we wasted a good 20 minutes to half hour with a slough of characters that were absolutely terrible and provided only one mildly amusing scene.

Long story short, Michael Bay, if you're reading this, the next time you make a Transformers movie, try to actually devote an acceptable length of the movie to, you know, Transformers.

That said, it was a fun movie. Shia LaBeouf is a great young actor who's a lot of fun to watch, and when the action sequences get going, they are very well done. If you go into it with a love of Transformers and/or a desire to enjoy the movie, you will. If you go in skeptical with an overly critical eye, there's a good chance you won't.

Final score(s):
9/10 for die hard Transformers fans
6/10 if you've got no clue who Optimus Prime is
somewhere in between for everybody else