Review of Transformers (2007) by Victor T — 11 Jul 2014

The beloved 80's cartoon is now put in the live action format under the direction of Michael Bay. Despite now having a negative reputation, this film still was a financial success.

Autobots and Decepticons are in war, obviously, which destroys their planet Cybertron. In this war, an almighty cube is thrown away to protect it from Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, and it lands on Earth. With this information, the transformers arrived to our planet in order to get their hands in this cube, resulting in a battle that puts the humans in the middle of this warfare.

With Michael Bay at the helm of this project, you are given what you expect from him: Lame jokes, a useless woman that is just there to be eye candy, USA's army blowing things up, USA patriotism, mindless action, over the top editing, shameless product placement, racial stereotypes and a ton of explosions. With a premise focused on alien robots, the film had to find a believable way to make a cartoon work in live action, this is where the films fails miserably: The story is full of plot holes, stupid dialog and a ton of unnecessary characters. With Spielberg as a producer, the film has his fingerprints in the form of ET illusions but the rest of the film is just what Bay loves: CGI and mindless explosions. The acting here is mostly awful, hell, even sometimes I believe more in the robots than the performances given by the humans. The big event of the film, the action scenes, are filmed in a very confusing way, you can barely know which robot is shooting. While failing on the storytelling aspect, the film is a technological marvel: Jaw drooping CGI, amazing sound effects and good choreographed action.

But even with all of those problems, this film manages to be enjoyable and keeping you entertained for almost all its runtime. Some of the complains are really just people bashing this film because they hate it, let's use one example: "I can't tell which robot is an autobot or a decepticon", you can tell because of the size and the model of the robot, if it has helicopter blades in its back then it's the Helicopter decepticon, simple enough. I get that this film is awful in a lot of things but is unfair to create more problems.

Undeniably the greatest of the franchise, it's an average mindless blockbuster but an entertaining one. Just go in expecting a good action film and nothing else.