Movie Review: Transformers

Transformers (2007): EXPLOSIONS! ROBOTS! CGI! MEGAN FOX! ACTION! I CAN'T HANDLE IT!

I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD DO THIS REVIEW IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT'S A MICHAEL BAY MOVIE. No. No that would be stupid. Enter the Movies is better than Michael Bay. Right? RIGHT? Look, Michael Bay is the Adam Sandler of action movies. There's no way around it unfortunately. I like some of his earlier stuff. I think Pearl Harbor is a very good movie. I think The Rock is good too, even though that's mostly because it's about Alcatraz and has Sean Connery and John Spencer in it. I even put Armageddon on my list of guilty pleasure movies. I mean who doesn't like I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing??? But man has everything else he's EVER done been TERRIBLE. This falls into that category of everything else. Look, I'm going to keep this review short and save my rant for the sequel, which is one of the worst movies of the 2000s. But here's the problem with this movie: there's no emotional weight to it. You could not give two sh*ts about the characters in the movie. You know you have a problem when the only character you even remotely care about is a giant yellow robot who can't talk for some reason.

Why is this the case you might ask? How about the fact that the acting is TOTALLY OVERDONE? God, who thought it would be a good idea to pair Megan Fox and Shia LeBeouf (was he ever famous?) together? WHO THOUGHT OF THAT IDEA. I WANT THAT INDIVIDUAL FIRED. Except, here's the thing! That person is probably Michael Bay. God d*mnit. These two have no chemistry whatsoever, and it's because they aren't given any chance to develop. At all. Not that it would've made a difference but still, they go from two friends to lovers in the span of about 5 minutes. Wait, what? I would never buy the notion that Megan Fox's character would even start this whole adventure with LeBeouf's character let alone somehow fall in love with him. It is laughably bad. No one else is given any chance to develop any character either, as the movie will just throw new characters at you and expect you to immediately care for them. Like the entire Sector 7 premise is thrown in well into act two of this 144 minute disaster  and we are supposed to just accept that it exists and that they somehow brought Megatron down from the Arctic Circle to the Hoover Dam without anyone noticing? Oh is that a spoiler? Does it matter? I think the entire world has seen this movie by now so it doesn't matter. Oh ya, Jon Voight is in this. Ya. He actually has a kinda-sorta-major role, even though he is cash-grabbing to the MAX here. Though it's not the worst cash-grab he's ever done. Let's just take a moment to remember that he was and always will be in SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2. That movie makes this movie look like Citizen Kane. But he's still pretty bad. Just like the rest of the acting in the movie.

Ok, so it's not all bad. The robots do look pretty cool and that action sequences are relatively well-done, minus the shaky-cam. The regular readers know that shaky-cam and I do not get along, but for you newcomers, first of all welcome to my sanity check and second know I don't like shaky-cam. I want to be able to see what's going on! I don't need some cheap mechanic trying to increase tension during the action sequences hindering my ability to respect what's happening on the screen. However some of the one-shots during the action sequences were actually amazing. The sweeping one-shots going back and forth between the good guys and the bad guys shooting at each other were ahead of their time in 2007. And just as cool as they are today. Bernie Mac is also in this movie. He, without a doubt, brings the most humor to the movie with his (likely improv'd) lines. When Bernie Mac is in a movie as bad as this it really lets him shine and you realize just how great of a comedic actor he really was. God rest his soul. The score is also really cool. Sure it's just a symphonic version of the main song of the film, Linkin Park's What I've Done, but it's still quite good. That's just about it. I will go more into why these movies are really bad in my next review.

The Critique: a typical Michael Bay movie. CGI porn with no emotional backing whatsoever. 

The Recommendation: if you haven't already seen this movie, you're doing it right.

Rewatchability: Moderately Low

The Verdict: 2.5/10 Somewhere Between Bad and Awful



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