I had very little experience with the cartoon, and STILL loathed this film. I went and saw it at the local midnight showing with a few friends, and walked out feeling like I had wasted my time and money. I honestly had pretty low expectations going in. I just wanted a big dumb movie with robots fighting each other. It failed to even reach that level. Instead, I got a movie about Shia Lebouf trying to shag Megan Fox while driving around in Herbie. The Transformers were barely in the damn movie, and when they did show up for fights it was often in the background of a shaky cam shot rolling around shooting at random stuff. Oh, and cheap humor. The movie was dragged down by tons on unnecessary characters who served as nothing but comic relief, adding nothing to the plot. The parents were dumb, the hackers were dumb, and even the Transformers seemed mostly there for humor until the final action scene. The overdone humor was even worse given how juvenile it was.
The biggest problem is that the movie can't decide what it wants to be. It has super serious military wank, dumb slapstick and sexual humor, and giants robots in dumb action. It's all so conflicted. It never settles on a tone. It all just clashes horribly, and ruins the pacing. The movie feels quite long, with the cool bits being strung apart by tons of stupid filler comedy. With the movie trying to do so much, all the aspects suffer. The action is limited by trying to crowbar in so much bad comedy, the serious military tone is undermined by the inherent corniness of giant robots stomping around, and the comedy tries to appeal to everyone with slapstick humor for kids and crude humor for young adults, so the humor lacks focus, and is shoved in where it doesn't belong. Combine this with a bad plot, and to me the movie is just nonredeemable.
the antithesis said:
Yeah, the plot is basically a nonfactor and stream of events. This is no more apparent than the setup for the final action scene. The autobots wanted the glasses so they could find Megatron, and the location was etched on them. This ends up being moot as it turns out the government had Megatron, making the entire thrust of the plot and Sam's character importance meaningless. However, despite the glasses saying Megatron wasn't even on this continent, and not knowing he was found here, the robots are STILL meeting the heroes in the desert. WHAT. WHY. WHY ARE THEY DRIVING IN THE DESERT WHEN THEY HAVE NO REASON TO KNOW MEGATRON WAS THERE. THEY HAD NO REASON TO BE THERE TO RUN INTO THE MILITARY GUYS. It's like the entire plot forgot itself because it needed a final action scene in a city. And then after the scene where there is millions of damage to city property with giant robots openly running around, we're supposed to believe that the government covered it up. I felt INSULTED at the end of the movie.