Transformers is a straight action movie, and in being an action movie it succeeds wonderfully. Certainly the script could have benefited from some more work. Hot computer hacker girl and her wise-cracking black friend eat up too much screen time while not advancing the story whatsoever. John Turturro’s government agent character is simply lame. There are too many cheesy lines. They say “more than meets the eye” twice. But robots blow each other up. The action is just perfect. Big, loud, exciting.
It isn’t the cartoon you watched as a kid. It’s just not, and don’t expect it to be. A few of the robots have enough of a resemblance to the original that it’s still Transformers, but it is an action movie version of that cartoon, not an adaptation of it. In this regard I think Michael Bay was right in making the robots look more alien and less like the original characters. It removes them a bit from needing to be what they were in the cartoon.
There’s a cliché in monster movies where Godzilla shows up, the army comes in and fires its useless weapons, and then the scientists find a way to stop him. Transformers, not terribly subtly, turns this around. The film opens in Iraq with a Decepticon blowing away an army base. Josh Duhamel and his squad escape and, by the climax, get to blow up their own Decepticon. It’s like Michael Bay is saying, “Hey America, I know it’s depressing that we can’t win in Iraq, but our military still kicks ass! They can blow up Transformers!” In fact, one of the key climactic Transformer-on-Transformer battles happens off-screen while Josh Duhamel and his squad get to do the ass-kicking.
In the hands of a better director the movie could have been a deconstruction of monster movies and 80s nostalgia. Instead Bay blows shit up, and does it spectacularly. I’d have loved it to have been smarter, but wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice any of the wall-to-wall carnage for it.