The story of the film is a teenager (LaBeouf) called Sam buys his first ever care; a rusty old camaro. He is now very excited that he can now use this car to pick up the girl of his dreams (Fox). Unbeknown to him his new car is actually a transforming alien robot that is part of a whole team, called the Autobots, who have come to save the human race from another team of transformers called the Decepticons. The Decepticons are there on earth searching for a cube which could lead to them being able to take over the entire universe. The humans (and Sam specifically), are caught up in this war between these transforming alien robots.
The obvious attraction and definitely the biggest plus point of this film is the effects. There is absolutely no denying that this is one spectacular film to look at. I can 100% guarantee you that you will not have seen any special effects that look as good as these do. This is one of those rare special effects bonanzas that have zero flaws when it comes to the actual physical look of the special effects themselves; (the problem I had with the viewing of those special effects I will get to later) this film is flawless.
The story is where the first problem lies with this film. And that is there isn’t much of one. Sure we have this totally ridiculous and almost stupid story or reason why these transforming robots are here but the main story related to the human characters (and their relation to these robots) is lacking tremendously. There are a tenfold of smaller plot threads and points that don’t get delved into as much as they could have been and some are left so unexplained that it is plain annoying. But I expect if you want to see this film you are not expecting something like The Shawshank Redemption.
Problems continue for this film; with the script up next. Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman should have seriously considered giving the script 100 times more care and attention than they did. It seemed like they were just throwing in multiple one liners, mainly coming from the robots, trying to sound cool to a semi-younger audience. One scene in particular, where Optimus Prime (leader of the Autobots if you don’t know), introduces all of his allies. I actually wanted to cover my face in sheer embarrassment at some of the dialogue that the various robots were coming out with. This is also very much as cheesy with some of the human dialogue and scenes. There are various, although amusing, unnecessary scenes of Sam trying to impress a girl and his car (who is a robot remember) starts acting weird. If only they had taken as much care with the script as they did with the effects then this would have been a much better film.
Although Shia LaBeouf is shaping up to be a fine young actor, and some of the lines he comes out within the film is funny, I still found the attempts at humour with him and some of the rest of the humans (and robots) just didn’t work. Maybe in another movie, at another time this would work but in a special effects Michael Bay action film the humour, for the most part, just came off as extremely cheesy.
My aforementioned problem with the actual view of the fantastic special effects is as follows; for the most part you could barely see anything. We were too close to the action. In the final battle of the film I felt like pausing it, flying to Michael Bay’s house, grabbing him by both shoulders and saying to him, “Michael, do you see the zoom out button? It is fully functional, you know.” By the time the film ended my head was in a spin as I had spent the last 140 minutes trying to work which robot was fighting which robot.
The Transformers is what it is. There isn’t a whole lot more I could say about it. It’s a two and half hour long movie about robots beating the hell out of each other, what more can you say? The fans of the original TV show will be in heaven and the kids are sure to have a good time watching all the pretty big robots transforming.
Despite the films abundance of problems I still ended up enjoying watching a bunch of robots beating the crap out of each other for a couple of hours. I would have loved it if Bay and everyone involved had remembered to take better care with every other aspect of the film than the effects. But I certainly don’t want to discourage you to get out and see this film, to, if nothing else, witness the very best visual effects in movie history.
==Written by Ross Miller== ==From: Movie World (www.movie-world.moonfruit.com)==
Fans of the earlier film and TV series will be thrilled at this cutting-edge incarnation, but this version should please all fans of high-adrenaline action. Director Bay gleefully salts the movie with homages to pop-culture touchstones like Raiders of the Lost Ark, King Kong, and the early technothriller WarGames. The actors, though clearly all supporting those kickass robots, are uniformly on-target, including the dashing Josh Duhamel as a U.S. Army sergeant fighting an enemy he never anticipated; Jon Voight, as a tough yet sympathetic Secretary of Defense in over his head; and John Turturro, whose special agent manages to be confidently unctuous, even stripped to his undies. But the film belongs to Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, and the dastardly Megatron--and the wicked stunts they collide in all over the globe. Long live Transformers! --A.T. Hurley
Runtime:
143
DVD Region:
3
Disc Type:
DVD
Aspect Ratio:
16:9
Video Format:
MPEG-2
Parental Control:
1
Video Signal:
NTSC
Layers:
2
Subtitles:
Indonesian (Indonesia)
Chinese (Taiwan)
English (United States)
Korean (Korea)
Chinese (Taiwan)
Thai (Thailand)
English (United States)
Korean (Korea)
Sound Mix:
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital








