Transformers is boring. Its action is boring. It has no real plot -- no, really, all of its plot points are marred with contradictions, so the sum total is no real plot -- so it isn't engaging.
The explosions aren't interesting because nothing explodes that you care about.
That's a crap movie. Yet Transformers is considered a shitty movie. How so?
· It isn't worth seeing opening day, even for nostalgia's sake. That can rankle. My friends and I saw it opening day. We were talking about something besides Transformers within a few minutes of leaving the theater, and it never came up again.
· Michael Bay is a bigoted piece of shit. This is known. His racism is in his movies. The more of it in his movies, the shittier they are. His use of Jazz was extra-racist here to people who knew the cartoon because they were aware of Bay's conscious decision to replace someone like Scatman Caruthers with Generic Ghetto Thug -- something that would only make sense to a white bigot. To someone not familiar with the cartoon, Jazz' voice merely sounds like an insensitive choice, since the context isn't clear. Thus, a crappy movie for some will be absolute shit for others even ignoring nostalgia. That's the key here: even if your nostalgia wasn't ruined, this movie says "fuck you unless you're also a piece of shit" -- e.g., it's offensive. But the later movies are far worse.
· The Transformers are supporting cast. Michael Bay sucks Pentagon cock -- and since Pentagon cock is shrunken, diseased, and only becomes erect during prison torture or rape, that's particularly odious. These two things combined begin to rankle. Bay's military fetishism wouldn't be so bad if the Transformers were allowed to consistently come along for the ride -- after all, the Transformers raison d'arte is fighting and the military fights, so peanut-butter-meet-chocolate. But the Transformers aren't allowed in, because Bay also has a fetish for high-maintenance supermodels with 12-year-old-boy figures, so that's what we get instead of the point of the movie.
· The Transformers are ugly. And confusing. And their aesthetic style is changed because Bay is bad at his job and literally -- this is true -- didn't even want to do the Transformers, so the artwork was basically his attempt to divorce the robots from the source material. Since the vapid source material is still more sophisticated than his actual narrative(s), this maneuver accomplished nothing but failure.
·· And that said, the transformers don't look dangerous -- they look like overacting garbage. You can't tell what the fuck is going on with them so they never hit the uncanny valley that you need to make them seem impressively alien. Because the transformations aren't clean -- like the original toys/cartoons -- the transformation sequence and transformer movements aren't interesting. You're watching blobs move on the screen. And when you can make out their forms, their movements are slow, jerky, imprecise, and Obviously Special Effects to the point where there is no immersion, which is aggravated by their busy motifs. Every element of their design is wrong in a way that worsens the other elements.
··· Compare the Bayformers to John Carpenter's The Thing -- the former are metallic versions of the alien in the latter. The Thing was horrifying because its component parts -- livers, hearts, hands, feet, brains, skin -- were being repurposed, before your eyes, into more useful shapes. You could see the flesh warp into an adaptation. But when a Bayformer transforms, you can't really tell where most of the parts were a second ago, so the thrill of the transformation is lost.
· The entire movie is a blatant marketing ploy. Since there is no plot and the movie is boring, the only thing left is advertising. And since advertising >> source material, the transformers don't even look like themselves, so there is NOTHING in this movie for someone who knows something about the Transformers. Literally, the only demographic that can enjoy this film are racist assholes born after 1989.
· When a franchise gets a Piece of Shit entered into its product line, it either slows, stifles, pauses, or outright KILLS that line. While Bay has it, no one else has it. Now, the source material itself is rather bad, but that isn't much of a problem since most of that tripe is low risk/low reward. Because of Green Lantern's film, the Justice League was axed, and those properties have far more forward momentum than the Transformers.
