I'd figure I'd use your thread to post my review, Solo:
TRANSFORMERS: B-
There's not much need to write anything here, so I'll cut to the chase - this is a raw, entertaining piece of robot, gun and military porn. And it's fun. And even more surprisingly, it's funny. The humor works for the most part, although a few gags are juvenile (Bumblebee urinates on John Turturro!) and some just fall flat (John Turturro is crazy!). It's cheesy , but it knows its cheesy and that kind of self-relevance really helps the movie a long way.
The film opens up with a fantastic action set piece in Qatar that introduces how destructive the robots are. These aren't the boxy sentient beings from the cartoon, whose lasers made "pew! pew!" noises - these things are giant pieces of metallic destruction that will beat the living shit out of you. They don't look cheesy or dumb, they look like walking pieces of carnage.
Then we meander in and out of what feels like a Spielberg film. Shia LeBouf wants the car to get the hot chick (Megan Fox, who looks insanely hot) and finds an otherworldly protector in Bumblebee as a Camaro. It feels like coming of age tale and it feels suburban and it's got humor never seen in a Bay film, but we've seen all of these elements in a Spielberg film. Even the way the Autobots are utilized early on, as a form of comedic relief (they struggle to stay incognito and at one point Ironhide recommends incinerating Shia's parents) and gentle giants feels very Spielberg. One wonders how involved he was.
The paper thin story has just enough juice to juggle its convenient subplots to the film's MacGuffin (called the Allspark here!) and a frozen Megatron. His mere physical form just looks evil and his presence, voiced by Hugo Weaving, is so menacing that you wonder if the Autobots are more worried about the MacGuffin or Megatron. Also, why the military would house something that just looks like evil incarnate, waiting for the inevitable day it thaws out and slaughters mankind, is mind boggling. But I digress, because if you're looking for a gritty and clever Sci-Fi story, you're all out of luck in this installment.
What Transformers is, especially in its last half (in which Bay has murdered his Spielberg-self and is in full out Bad Boys II w/ robots mode), is loud and big and chock full of explosions as the robots launch an all out inner city war against one another. The Autobots, so determined to protect humanity, don't really seem to care about the mounting body count, especially as Optimus Prime and Megatron crash through office and apartment buildings. Which, despite the almost positive decimation of half of the population of "Mission City", is one of the most awesome things put on celluloid.
No matter what you think of the story, how preposterous is, the fact is that Bay and ILM have created imagery on a scale that you've never, ever seen before. Prior to the inner city ruckus, and clocking in just shy of four minutes, the brawl between Prime and Barricade (from transformation to Prime's violent resolution) made jaws unhinge in the theater. I don't think I've heard an audience kind of make a collective gasp like that in a long time.
One wishes Bay had a real set of writers or (at the very least) a better shooting script, because this film falls short of the definitive blockbuster status it reaches for. Shia LeBouf and amazing robot imagery carry the entire film, which struggles with its subplots and lack of fleshed out characters, but is never completely undone by its faults. In such an awful year for blockbusters, this one is easily the best, and is a great deal of fun. I enjoyed it as an adult, but I bet if I was 8-years-old, I would probably consider this the greatest film of all-time.
Overall: Michael Bay pulls out every conceivable trick from his beginning-to-feel overused bag of tricks, and combines them with the fantastic use of real military props and ILM wizardry to make one of the slickest action films this decade that overcomes a paper thin story and shoddy character development. Way better than an adaptation of an animated 80s cartoon deserves to be.
