*This is a little blup of the Movie taken from my reply on Botch's site here. I don't think I'll attempt to pen all my opinions of the movie, that would take up chunks of cyberspace.*Saw the movie. Mixed feelings.
"In my heart, this was a Transformers movie... but not the Transformers movie, and certainly not our Transformers movie." Totally agree. It's not Transformers in everything but name. Sad that Hasbro has to whore out the TF name like that.
With that being said, I did enjoy the movie. As a movie, it was great - nice pace, nice action, humour at the right time (yes, Shia was good), reasonably sufficient characterization. I know, Decepticons not characterised. My take is that Bay took it to the extreme and made Decepticons as militaristic as he could- cold, ruthless, efficient, does not waste Energon on useless chatter (including talking to each other). Afterall, Decepticons were the 'military models' (a la
War Dawn).
Still, this movie could have been called 'Giant fcknicg robots from Mars/Venus/Pluto/Space' and still could have worked; it could have been 'Challenge of the GoBots'. It didn't need to tarnish the legendary 'Transformers' brand name.
Knowing how die hard I am about the vintage Transformer cartoons and toys, I would never care for the movie as much as I care about the TFs of the 80s.
But having said that, I'd just go along for the ride now and get off when it ceases to be entertaining.
