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Movie Review

Transformers

Burn in Hell Michael Bay (2007)
Reviewed by A Very Angry Steve, added on Jul 6 2007

Oh God. Where do I begin? This movie should have been great. It should have been the epic culmination of a 20+ year old dream I’ve had of seeing my robotic heroes on the big screen in glorious fashion. It should have been the knock out orgasm-fest I always imagined it to be. What I got instead was a movie about a bunch of uninteresting people who’s lives are impacted by the appearance of a bunch of giant alien robots. Oh, and the robots themselves actually show up sometimes.

Let’s start with the good. The Transformers look fucking phenomenal. I take back every bad thing I ever said about the character designs. ILM made me eat my words. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron, all of them look real. Well, as real as you’d expect giant robots to look. No, the Transformers themselves are not the problem in this movie.

The problem with this movie is that apparently Michael Bay and the writers didn’t think that the Transformers themselves could carry their own movie. And so we have four subplots involving various random human characters and how they deal with what all is going on. The only human characters that have any business being in the movie for more than five minutes are Sam and whatever the chick he was trying to hump’s name was. That’s it. End of cast. But no. On top of them we get John Voight’s useless Secretary of Defense character, a group of survivors of an early Decepticon attack that don’t do anything but get in the way of the action, a retarded secret government agency that has been studying the Transformers for a hundred years and a group of 20 something super hackers that just kind of hang out during the whole movie. I’ll admit that some of the scenes with just the human characters are damn hilarious (in fact the entire movie has a great sense of humor about it) and I suppose I can actually see why they are in the movie. Bay or whoever wanted to show the human side of things. Well I don’t give a fuck about the human side of things. I see the human side of things every day. Humans suck. I want to see the fucking robotic side of things.

The Transformers are shockingly in the movie very little until the very end of the movie. Four of the Decepticons (Megatron included, WTF?) don’t even show up in the movie until the last 30 minutes of the movie. For the first two hours of the movie the only Decepticons you see are Barricade (who is a super fucking badass), Frenzy who’s basically a plot device, and Blackout. Blackout and Barricade pop up early in the movie, but are only there for about 15 minutes total and then disappear until the final fight scene. The only Transformers at all who have any significance are Prime and Bumblebee. All the other Autobots get one big introductory scene and then maybe 5 more lines on top of that spread out through the rest of the movie.

Then there are the plot holes. Giant chasm like plot holes. I’m not even going into these. Let’s just say they’re bad. Like an entire Transformer disappears from the movie for no reason and never comes back and is never mentioned again kind of bad. Like Bay just forgot about the character. I’m dead serious.

I’m done griping about this movie. I’ve heard tons of people tell me how fucking amazing this movie is. To those people, you’re not a true fan. You probably like Beast Wars. Pussies. If you’re looking for a movie about how a bunch of people you’ll never care about act when giant robots show up, then this Bud is for you. But, if you’re like me and still waiting for a Transformers movie that’s actually about the damn Transformers, you’ll just have to hope for a sequel.

4 / 10

Comments from MaT...
piece of crap.

Maybe Michael Bay thought "Well, we already kinda showed Barricade fight Bumblebee...so he doesn't need an extra fight scene at the end of the film".

The effects were stellar. I thought the much hyped battle scenes left much to be desired (as in, they barely showed any of them). The characters sucked ass (god how I hate Shia Labeouf) and the narrative was all over the place.

2.5/10