i liked it for the super mark-out moments, like optimus transforming for the first time, and him gearing up to fight megatron, prime saying "one shall stand, and one shall fall", megatron yelling at starscream and even when bumblebee came to life and smacked the VW bug.
thought the robots lookes much aweshome, the transforming was neato, and the battle scenes were sweet.
i didn't hate the human segments of the film anywhere near as much as i thought i would, however i hated them as a whole in that they took up far too much of the film. instead of robots punching each other in their robot balls, it was people going to parties and a love story and being stopped on a highway by some secret military force lead by mr. deed's' foot fettish butler.
i also was not a fan of the 35 foot robots being able to sneak around town with ease like 50-ton ninjas. that is not how i interpretted the "in disguise" portion of the theme song.
the most effective transformer in the entire film was the lil skeletal looking guy, that hacked all the systems. spider shapes, hiding as a stereo, offensive attacks, sneaking all around... he was it.
but i have no idea who he was. or if he was even a transformer from my youth's cartoon.
in fact, i didn't know who most of them were. the autobots were at least differentiated from one another by some bolder colors, but that wasn't always useful. in robot modes, everyone was very difficult to tell apart. and none of them had any more than 1 line and 2 minutes of camera time to give me a chance to figure out if i could.
jazz was ripped in half ...them? sad.
even prime, outside of his cool battle axe headshot kill, was punked a little too easily by megatron, who was only defeated because of everyone else attacking him, and sam's special christmas gift. apparently, he was the only one to figure out how else to dispose of the box. thanks for missing that one, super advanced robots from the future.
all in all, my complaints are more so about wanting to have seen more of the transformers -- no major gripes with storyline or pacing or anything of that sort. i would have easily have been much happier with a movie that was 30 minutes longer, were those 30 minutes dedicated to the autobots and decepticons, and everything else left as is.
hopefully this really was a first episode, of sorts, with much more roboting to take place in the not-too-distant future.
