Transformers

Transformers

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Editorial Reviews

From director Michael Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg comes a thrilling battle between the heroic Autobots® and the evil Decepticons®. When their epic struggle comes to Earth, all that stands between the Decepticons® and ultimate power is a clue held by young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). Unaware that he is mankind’s last chance for survival, Sam and Bumblebee, his robot disguised as a car, are in a heart-pounding race against an enemy unlike anything anyone has seen before. It’s the incredible, breath-taking film spectacular that USA Today says “will appeal to the kid in all of us.”

"I bought a car. Turned out to be an alien robot. Who knew?" deadpans Sam Witwicky, hero and human heart of Michael Bay's rollicking robot-smackdown fest, Transformers. Witwicky (the sweetly nerdy Shia LaBeouf, channeling a young John Cusack) is the perfect counterpoint to the nearly nonstop exhilarating action. The plot is simple: an alien civil war (the Autobots vs. the evil Decepticons) has spilled onto Earth, and young Sam is caught in the fray by his newly purchased souped-up Camaro. Which has a mind--and identity, as a noble-warrior robot named Bumblebee--of its own. The effects, especially the mind-blowing transformations of the robots into their earthly forms and back again, are stellar.

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

Customer Reviews

Transformers has transformed our hearts again

Reviewed by Kristen Caselnova, 2010-03-03

Transformers was always my favorite cartoon growing up as a child. Whenever it was on I'd plop myself down in front of the TV screen and watched for hours on end. Now, being an adult and going to college I've always missed watching that show. But lucky enough for me, they made a movie of it. This movie was probably one of the most well thought out and most well made films I have seen in a long time (even the sequel was good which is such a shocker.) It made me want to see more ideas from the producer and writers, and it also made me change my ways of thinking that not all sequels are terrible. They are now shooting for Transformers 3 so I've heard, and I can't wait for it to come out. Transformers all the way. Autobots, roll out.

Amazing

Reviewed by I. Siddiqui, 2010-03-03

One of my very favorite movies. I loved it as soon as i saw it. i have no idea what those people who voted 1 or 2 stars are talking about. Just a great movie and even better on BluRay. Good effects, great sound, and just enough laughs to make it a comedy. There are days i can just stay home and watch this, and i'd have a successful night.

Awesome movie, my number 1

Reviewed by T. Toribio, 2010-03-01

This is the greatest movie I have seen in recent years. I usually don't like to see movies more than once except for those that are very good. The very good movies, I'll watch them twice and that's it. However, the Transformers is so good I can watch it over and over again and never get tired. I have seen it at least 3 times before I bought it and I can't stop watching it. I have a pretty good sound system so I really enjoy the special sound effects at its maximum. If you are an action sci-fi type of person, then you are going to love this movie. I recomend the action lovers to buy this, you will not regret it. I just have to finish saying is an awesome movie, it will be hard to see another movie top this one (at least for me).

One of Michael Bay's better movies out there

Reviewed by Jennifer A. Everhart, 2010-02-28

Director Michael Bay's movies have either been hit or miss. Armageddon and Pearl Harbor were basically powerhouses with uninspired plots. There are a few good films that he directed as well, such as The Rock and Bad Boys, for example. This is one of them, based on the popular long-running action figure line of the same name, Transformers. It has been around since the 1980's and spun off many anime series, and I saw some episodes of Armada as a pre-teen. I then heard about this live-action film adaptation to the series in 2007 and, believe it or not, I thought it was pretty good. It is nothing epic like Terminator 1 & 2, but still good cheesy fun. Acclaimed filmmaker Steven Spielberg also joined in as an executive producer as well. It involves the Autobots, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Jazz, and Ratchet teaming up with a teenage boy Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), his girlfriend Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), and Commander Robert Epps (Jon Voight), to stop the Decepticons, Megatron, Starscream, Frenzy, Barricade, Bonecrusher, and Blackout from claiming the Cube of the All Spark when Sam unknowingly buys Bumblebee as his first car. Simple, but enjoyable. They intend to use the All Spark Cube to restore their home planet Cybertron. When the Decepticons launch an attack at the Hoover Dam and the Autobots lure them into the city where many of the Decepticons were destroyed, especially Megatron when Sam shoves the Cube into his chest. They dump their corpses into the Laurentian Abyss, Sam and Mikaela form a relationship, and the Autobots spread a message to the rest of their kind in space that they made a new home on Earth. The only surviving Decepticon was Starscream leaving to inform The Fallen, setting the stage for the overtly stupid sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, that I will review later on. However, the original is a great movie. The visual effects and action are top notch. The acting is good as well, with a few corny lines every now and then. Peter Weller reprises the role of Optimus Prime, and even though he also voiced Ironhide in the original cartoons, Jess Harnell fills in and replicates it just fine. The sets also looked real. There are a couple minor issues however. The focus on the humans was a little overplayed in expense to the Autobots, but that would just be nit-picking. This is another movie worth picking up. I would recommend it to anyone, even die-hard Transformers fans.

Tries to do too much, does none of it well

Reviewed by TJ Hara, 2010-02-21

I wish I saw in this the same movie that a lot of other people are giving four- and five-star ratings to. By way of full disclosure, I was a huge Transformers geek as a kid--had all the toys, was wrecked when they killed Optimus Prime and a host of other characters in order to introduce an updated toy line in the big-screen animated movie--you get the picture. That said, I don't understand why anyone would think this movie to be anything other than a rough draft that got filmed before they finished writing it.

Bay's film tries to do humor, tries to do intrigue, tries to do action, and tries to do sci-fi, but it so fails to integrate those aspects together into a cohesive film that the final product feels like a John Hughes teen comedy duct-taped to a Tom Clancy spy thriller and a copy of Black Hawk Down. The humor in particular just rubs wrong against what could have been another two-dimensional franchise updated to take place in the same world we occupy, in the vein of the first two X-Men movies, or the relaunched Batman franchise.

Even as far as visuals are concerned I was pretty let down: the robots' designs were massively overcomplicated relative to their cartoon counterparts in order to produce a more real-world look, but a side-effect is that fight scenes blur into sequences of giant robotic tumbleweeds swirling around each other.

The only bright spots I took away from this movie were the return of Peter Cullen as the iconic voice of Optimus Prime, and the use of a few choice pieces of dialogue picked from twenty years of Transformers history. Watch it once if you're curious, but in this reviewer's opinion you're better off watching the 1986 animated film.