Peter Cullen died recently at the ripe old age of 85, and so we’re going to talk about the movie that had one of his most famous voice acting roles. That’s right… The first Predator that came out in 1987.
Just kidding, it’s Michael Bay’s Transformers, brought to you by practically every product placement in the world, including the US . What started as a project for the GI Joe toyline (which would be directed by Stephen Sommers in 2009), Transformers has almost nothing to do with the original shows, movies, or comics. As a toyline that’s been around since 1984, there’s been a LOT of content, and Michael Bay avoided all of it. But to explain whether this movie is good or bad, we need to figure out what Transformers even is.
And for transparency: I… never cared for Transformers itself.
I watched Beast Wars as a kid, I liked the Bionicle toys, I liked Hot Wheels, but I could never get into the idea of a brightly colored robot turning into a normal car as a way to disguise itself. Beast Wars tried to make sense of it by having them transform to resist the energon spikes of Earth, but Transformers never tried to step out of that absurdity. The toy itself was so you can roll the wheels as a toy car, and then pull the parts around so a robot can walk around. Boys love playing with cars and playing with robots, so this was a two in one deal at the toy store.
The toyline that inspired it started in Japan as a puzzle style toy back in the 70s, which included household objects, and never tried to have a storyline or narrative. Around that time, Hasbro was having a decrease of sales with their Star Wars lineup, which was a massive thing back in the 70s, alongside the first gen of GI Joe(with the kung fu grip) and the Nerf Ball. An interesting part of the late 70s and early 80s is how much the US was… well, using Japan as occupied territory and a cheap media alternative. Much like how we use South Korea now to create a lot of media for peanuts, Japan started being the main source of exotic goods. If you ever wondered how anything Japanese became popular in the US, it’s because Stan Lee had Marvel tether the countries together with Toei back in 1977.
Marvel was also used for the comic books and storylines of both GI Joe and Transformers when Hasbro caught wind of these little puzzle toys from Takara called Microman. Funny enough, Microman was created because GI Joe was popular, but they couldn't really make military toys in Japan because of US occupation. The reason Japan has so much media about futuristic robots and mechs is the same reason hentai has tentacles and pixelation: the US placed stupid laws that prevented them from having sensible media, so they had to find a work around.
During Transformers G1 (the first generation), the TV show was used to market the toys. Most episodes followed the same premise as He-Man and GI Joe, which followed the Spider-man and His Amazing Friends setup: a villain has an evil scheme and the heroes go out to stop them. This repeated itself for 98 episodes… across 3 years. These days, a TV show would struggle to make 8 episodes a year. In the 80s, we had over 30.
Back then, Marvel was an animation powerhouse, which technically it still is but not in a good way.
I mention all of this because the storyline of Transformers never truly mattered. It’s not like it’s designed to be complicated. It’s two factions duking it out and fighting over some MacGuffin, same like He-Man and same like GI Joe and same like Command and Conquer. But while GI Joe was just a special army unit fighting mutant terrorists like Captain America would, Transformers went the Fantastic Four route… which is absolutely bonkers.
Allow me to explain the concept of Transformers in a few sentences.
There’s a planet called Cybertron, which is actually a robot god of light called Primus. I know I lost some of you already, but stay with me. The two factions that live on Cybertron are the good guys called Autobots and the bad guys are called Decepticons. The reason they fight is because their bodies are fueled by an energy called energon. This becomes scarce on Cybertron, so they fight over reserves.
Primus fights against a god of chaos called Unicron, who doesn’t really come into the picture until the motion picture of 1986, where he’s defeated by an alliance of the Autobots and Decepticons and he’s reduced to a head that serves as a moon that revolves around Cybertron.
So if most of the story takes place on another planet, why does Earth get involved?
Earth has a lot of energon and so both factions crash land on Earth to take whatever they can get. The problem is that it’s not a natural form of energon because that stuff was made by Primus and is on Cybertron. Earth allows them to make a synthetic energon cube, which is made from things like electricity, oil, and volcanos. The Autobots want to trade and be on good terms with humans to get this resource, while the Decepticons want to enslave humans and conquer the solar system. And all of this is after the Ark crashed on Earth during dinosaur times, and both factions were woken up by a volcanic eruption, leading to an attack on a nearby oil rig.
This is where humans first meet both Autobots and Decepticons, with the father and son duo called Sparkplug and Spike Witwicky, who befriend the autobots and help to repair their battle damages.
This is G1 in a nutshell. Very little story happens outside of this. So what the 2007 movie set out to do was combine GI Joe with Transformers under the guidance of a famous alien movie producer (Spielberg) and he chose a director who was known for making very urban crime comedies and had a little experience with space when he made Armageddon(1998), which is about a giant meteor getting blown up by Bruce Willis.
But thankfully, Bay also had war film experience with Pearl Harbor (2001), where he got practically everything wrong when it comes to the Day of Infamy, all because he wanted a bunch of explosions and some romance story that nobody cared about.
Little did he know, all he had to do was make a movie about a Japanese inspired toyline from the 80s and all of his past sins would be redeemed.
Originally, I wanted to do a scene by scene review, because I kept track of every scene in my notes like the fool I am. The problem is that this is a 2.5 hour hunk of garbage that really should have been 90 minutes. The basic plot is that we have two groups, Team A and Team B dealing with killer robots from space called Decepticons, and all because these robots want to find the Allspark.
In the prologue, Peter Cullen himself narrates as Optimus Prime about how the Allspark Cube crashed on Earth long ago and it was created before time itself. At first it was called the Allspark Matrix, but they changed it to a cube because The Matrix trilogy was still popular and they thought audiences would confuse the two. This thing landed… somewhere, and so Megatron chased it down after knowing the coordinates, with Megatron frozen in the Arctic Circle when he crashed, to be later discovered by an explorer called Archibald Witwicky, who had the coordinates burned into his glasses when he accidentally touched Megatron’s hand.
So touching Megatron’s hand activates his eye lasers to burn the last thing he was thinking of into the nearest pane of glass… Got it!
Team B is actually the first team we see, but they don’t matter as much because they’re the residue of the GI Joe script. Meet the leader of the team, Captain Willaim Lennox(played by Josh Duhamel, who I only recognize as Jacob from The Callisto Protocol), who introduces himself by talking to his wife and new baby on a laptop, which is how we get tension when they have to unplug the wi-fi with a fireaxe. Why is someone pulling a Robert Chandler and chopping down the internet? Well, an attack helicopter entered the base and transformed into a giant killer robot, revealed to be named Blackout.
Coincidentally enough, he causes a blackout. Blackout by name AND Blackout by reputation.
There’s also Sergeant Robert Epps (played by Tyrese Gibson (of Fast and Furious fame), who is forever burned into my mind as “that guy with blinding white teeth in the commercial.” It's always stayed with me the clip of them running in the desert and all I can see is this guy’s giant chompers gleaming like they’re calling out an SOS. Now, the reason why they’re running is because the base is blown up by Blackout, and another Decepticon called Scorponok goes into the sand and pops out to chase them.
You might think “oh, this happens all in the same scene, right?”
No!
Blackout hacks the Qatar SOCCENT base, then we cut to Team A, made up of Sam Witwicky and Mikaela Banes. Each team gets like 5 seconds and then they switch, with very little progress each scene. For example, Team B left the base at night, to later be walking through the desert in the day, only to have a random guy speak Spanish and Epps says the robot stared right at him. As you can see, it’s not important, but Bay put it there to remind the audience that they exist.
You might start seeing a pattern with how they viewed the audience and their mental capacity.
I think that’s my main problem with these films. Not only is it designed for ADHD, but it’s designed like Michael Bay never left his career of doing car commercials and music videos. Each edit lasts a second, each scene is 5 seconds, and nothing is allowed to breathe. Once your eyes can comprehend the hyper yellow and blue shot, you’re already in a different location with different characters talking. If someone told me the editor was blindfolded and had to use his sense of smell, I would believe them.
That’s another annoying thing about the film: the filters they used make every image as orange as possible, like everyone ate too many carrots. Teeth and eyes are blinding white, everyone is hyper tan, and every scene might as well be locked into the world’s longest sunset.
Team B gets chased all the way to a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and they are in desperate need of a phone. Lennox picks up a kid and magically finds the right house where his parents live, asking for a phone to people who magically understand English. He calls for air support on the phone because Scorponok is hot on their tail shooting missiles from his pincers. Two fun facts about this scene is that it was shot at the White Sands Missile Range, which is still technically radioactive from Trinity, and required a sweep to make sure there aren’t any unexploded ordnance hidden in the sand; AND the hunt for the phone was based on a real story Bay heard from a soldier, which may or may not have included the Indian operator we get in the film.
Bay learned from his past mistakes with Pearl Harbor and so he asked military people to double check the script to make sure it’s not painfully inaccurate again. Sadly, he didn’t ask computer people to check how computers work, but we’ll get to that later.
There’s this thing in Michael Bay movies called “bayhem”, where he makes sure the real set is blurred and blended into the special effects by constantly moving the camera and splicing the footage like it’s a commercial. This works wonderfully when you’re not paying attention. You see a bunch of explosions and screaming, ok, you go back to falling asleep on your long flight to China. But to someone who’s paying attention and wants to keep track of words, every scene leaves the brain no matter what.
Lindsay Ellis made a video about how it’s hard to remember what happens in these movies, and she had one thing right: sensory overload causes people to check out, but not about senses. It’s about how we get a million points of interest in a scene and they aren’t connected to each other. It’s this lack of synergy and lack of unification that makes it always seem to be several stories at a time. For example, things are exploding, people are shooting, Scorponok shoots back, and then the Indian Operator is asking if the guy wants an express service package or whatever, and all the while Lemmox has to find a credit card and only Epps has one, which is on his left cheek pocket, causing Epps to scream “left cheek” over and over again.
There are like 5 stories being told while everything is exploding.
Bay uses this to his advantage because he’s designing it like a commercial. When cars are driving, it gets like 20 cuts before the wheels can do a single rotation, and when people are talking they always talk over each other so all you can catch is a random line that’s meant to be over the top. But then you get something involving the plot, and everything stops to have Optimus Prime stare directly at the camera and start saying his mumbo jumbo. So when we go from Sam’s book report, to getting his car, to soldiers fighting a giant robot scorpion, to searching for a credit card, to an Indian operator at his office, we have no idea why these scenes are together. But then we see the airstrikes happen with the A-10 Tank Killers using its gatling and the AC-130H Spectre Gunship uses its 105mm howitzer cannon, causing great damage to Scorponok and forcing him to retreat.
What many don’t appreciate is that the military could actually hold its own against Transformers. There is a lot of noise from small arms fire, but we also see that assault rifles can do damage and destroy the eyes of these robots, it’s just that they don’t do much. Later on, everyone realizes that the weakness of these robots is explosives, as if we expected something else from a Michael Bay film. For the most part, the military focuses on airstrikes, mostly to resemble how actual war is fought these days, and I guess multiple tanks on set would be expensive.
While they’re enjoying the action, Team A has Sam doing his book report in class about his great grandfather, Arichibald Witwicky. During his report, Sam tries to sell his great grandfather’s relics, like his glasses, and mentions the product placement eBay. Because he was hawking items in class, his teacher gives him a B-, ruining Sam’s chance of getting a car. And so, Sam begs, pleads, and cries for an A, asking his teacher what would Jesus do.
To address the Ironhide in the room, we have to understand that Sam is played by Shia LaBeouf, who unfortunately lost his marbles after this series. Most of it has to do with his messed up childhood, and his career started as a potty mouth stand-up comedian at age 10. You read that correctly: age 10. He was well known for swearing long before his rise to fame with Even Stevens, although many consider the movie Holes the reason why he was picked for the role of Sam. He was in a movie called Disturbia, which was filmed and released only a few months before his relation to Transformers, so we can’t really count that as a reason.
What I’m trying to say is that Shia LaBeouf was 20 when he played the role, but he’s supposed to be 16. This scene made me instantly hate Sam as a character and all of his dialogue that followed.
And you might be thinking “Hey, Witwicky! Haven’t I heard that stupid name before?” Yes, that’s the boy from G1, who was called Spike. They just switched it with a different name that starts with S. The character design is so much different from the cartoon, all because Bay loves to have a protagonist who doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. Shia played the role perfectly, with top notch acting.
The problem is that he doesn’t shut the fuck up and the dialogue is as if a teenager wrote it in anger after getting shoved in a locker.
After his dad pranks him with a Porsche product placement (with the car dealer right across the street from the school), they go to a used car lot owned by Bernie Mac. He’s funny with the back and forth between him and his mom, and the mom flipping him off. It’s just sad to see it in 2026 because he died shortly after the release (2008) and he was one of my favorite comedians. His delivery was able to make a painfully boring scene actually enjoyable as an Autobot called Bumblebee sneaks onto the auto lot.
There’s an autobot in an auto lot.
A little side note: Michael Bay has a very strange sense of humor, and I don’t know where this comes from. It’s funny, the back and forth with the mom and she flips him off made me love the scene, but it always comes out of nowhere in what is otherwise an overly white film. Bay himself grew up around all “white” people in LA, with his movie Bad Boys (1995) requiring Martin Larwence and Will Smith to “make sure the dialogue is properly colorful”.
Sam’s mom and dad are also great, but they don’t become comedy gold until the sequel. The dad’s highlight is when he makes Sam get a lemon (get it, BB is yellow) while they live in a giant LA mansion, and the mom has her moment when she embarrasses Sam in front of Mikaela when she’s in his room. Mojo the dog wasn’t my thing because I don’t care for chihuahuas and his highlight is that he lives in a bird house looking thing.
Sam is looking for a car, but little did he know, a car is looking for Sam. This part makes zero sense because none of the Autobots know about the glasses or Sam until later, meaning Bumblebee just wanted to have an owner who’s a random kid. Also, his original design was a Volkswagen Beetle, while here he’s a Chevrolet Camaro. It’s not much of a difference, but it’s a dorky car vs a muscle car, specifically so Sam can look cool and I guess Chevrolet paid more for product placement.
Sam has a crush on Mikaela(played by Megan Fox), so he goes to a party by a lake, his friend tries to climb a tree, and Mikaela’s boyfriend makes fun of Sam for failing football practice. This is all so that Mikaela tries to do a 10 mile walk home in anger, just so Sam can show off his car and make her horny. But BB pretends to break down in the middle of nowhere, leading us to the famous “reaching under the hood” scene; where she exposes her abs, her ass is arching like a McDonald’s sign, and we get to see her armpits.
I’ll be honest: it’s hard to care about this type of sexualized scene if you never saw the movie. I never saw it before, so I didn’t know why people kept making a fuss about Fox, especially since she wasn’t in anything much prior and she was fully clothed. Fun fact, she was actually in Bad Boy’s 2 (2003), but as an uncredited bikini dancer, meaning Micheal Bay worked with her, but didn’t know who she was when she arrived on set for Transformers. It’s a bit more embarrassing when you realize she was only 15 in that movie, with her age being 20 in Transformers, but trying to play a 16 year old.
This became the talk of the town because stupid people don't understand that a 20-year-old playing a 16 year old is still a 20-year-old. For whatever reason, controversy strikes when a character gets sexualized, and all of the feminists try to create as many ridiculous arguments as possible for why this is not allowed. Meanwhile, normal people looked at the scene and went “damn she's hot when she's all sweaty and working on the car.” Sure, Megan Fox looks like a Dollar Tree sex doll now that she’s full of plastic surgery, but when she was 20, she was one hot tamale. My favorite part of her body is not the bouncing B-cups or the lack of ass.
It’s her gorgeous blue eyes and her stiletto eyebrows. You can get lost in those divine peepers.
They hit it off, Sam says “you’re more than meets the eye”, which is a jab at the slogan of G1 "Transformers: more than meets the eye”. The slogan is actually great because these robots are certainly more than what we can see from their car shaped exteriors. And it’s not only about their disguise, but how these robots are living, and they have heart, with Optimus Prime representing the things that are willing to protect other living creatures. Bay uses this slogan to be a hipster about it, because he came into the project thinking the toyline is too childish for him. This is where we can understand why so much was changed from the source material.
Bay did the movie because he wanted to work with Spielberg as a job opportunity. Spielberg wanted to make it because he’s always focused on toylines and kids films. But for some reason, both are really dedicated to hitting that PG-13 rating with language and a warped sense of violence. For example, everyone is saying fuck and shit in the movie, but then the violence is unable to show any blood when everything explodes. So people will get shot by missiles and laser cannons, only to jump away from it instead of getting the Saving Private Ryan treatment.
And all the while, the entire movie is strictly designed for kids, while Michael Bay makes sure it’s for adults who act like kids.
People will think I’m stating it negatively, but it’s more about how Bay said the original script is “too kiddie” for his style, and then he turns around to make robots pee on people and every awkward joke is delivered twice (as if it was funny the first time). If anything, his mentality comes from how there’s a split in nerd culture between extrovert and introvert, with Transformers creating the perfect combination of the two sides.
If you like cars and military jargon, you get the extrovert aspect with conventionally hot chicks.
If you like robots and alien sci-fi, you get the introvert aspect with conventionally hot chicks who wear glasses.
I say this because Mikaela is meant to be that alternative to the cheerleader, where instead she’s a reluctant bad girl who works on cars, and there’s another girl who acts like a love interest for the audience who’s all about robots and computers.
Before we talk about Maggie, there’s a GIANT mess of BB driving away on his own, Sam getting arrested, cop claims he’s on drugs because he’s carrying doggy pain meds, BB chases Sam and Sam crashes his mom’s bike at a Burger King right in front of Mikaela. And all while flipping back and forth between Team B and the Pentagon. The only plot points are that BB calls for the other Autobots with a headlight signal, a Decepticon called Frenzy hacks Airforce One to find out about Sam’s eBay account, and so a cop car Decepticon called Barricade corners Sam under a bridge.
He transforms and starts pounding on the car Sam is trapped on top of, demanding to know if he’s Ladysman217 and where the glasses are. This scene is made more intense by how they used practical effects, and so Shia’s screams are pretty genuine when his feet are being bonked by an actual fender and other cars are actually flying over his head. Now you might be wondering “why not use a CGI car to fly overhead when they’re already using CGI for Barricade?"
Well…
Oh shit, it’s Bumblebee! Coming to the rescue. And Mikaela, who's driving a tiny blue scooter and trying her hardest to not look stupid. She’s almost successful, with both of them needing to be saved by Bumblebee, and so they get driven out of there in a high speed chase. They go through roads, through abandoned buildings, a trainyard, a power plant, we get all sorts of locations that make zero sense. For a movie that was dedicated to shoot on location, it didn’t put much effort to let us know what the locations are.
All Bay wanted was bragging rights.
Throughout the movie, we are distracted by how great the special effects look. In 2007, CGI was still rather new and even movies like Sin City (2005) had to revolutionize film making with very simple CGI models and backgrounds. But what many forget is that Stephen Spielberg practically created the CGI that we use today when he made Jurassic Park and this movie used a studio called ILM, which was started by George Lucas, who just got done making the prequel Star Wars trilogy. In short, the CGI was in AMAZING hands and the animators were all fans of the original Transformers series.
A key element that isn’t part of the original is that the faces of the Transformers here are designed like a Rubik’s Cube, rather than a full face coming into existence during transformation. A big focus was making sure every part of the vehicle’s mass gets used by the robot’s form, rather than evaporated or have a bunch of extra material appear from nothing. This was incredibly ambitious, and a decision from Bay himself, where the animation studio wanted to use a liquid type of face for the models. It was so ambitious that a single frame of the movie’s CGI took over 38 hours to render, especially since Bay wanted a form of ray tracing that would resemble his work from car commercials.
Frenzy pulls off Sam’s pants, Mikaela saws off Frenzy’s head with a random power tool, and BB finishes off Barricade in like 5 seconds. This movie tries really hard to have good CGI, but can’t have it for too long, so they would substitute fight scenes with humans doing something at a smaller scale. Frenzy’s head walks on its own to disguise itself as a cellphone and hides in Mikaela’s purse. We then see the other Autobots arrive in a giant meteor shower. We find out that the Transformers will scan a random vehicle in order to disguise as one, with Optimus Prime landing in a pool, gets asked if he’s the tooth fairy, and then changes into a semi-truck. This confused the hell out of me because I always thought he was a firetruck. I was kind of correct because he changed to one in the 2001 series, but the original had him as a semi.
And this brings up a good question: why DO they turn into cars?
Since G1, the point of a Transformer was not that they start as human cars and live on Cybertron without any human contact. Their initial forms were futuristic vehicles that simply allow them to travel faster, and this ability is used to disguise themselves on Earth and avoid confrontations. What many forget is that Transformers is in the super hero genre, and their vehicle form is like when Superman puts on the glasses to be Clark Kent. It’s a cool ability, and I now understand why they’re cars, but I also find the lack of proper choices caused by “wearing a uniform” a bit annoying.
What also bugs me is that everyone is introduced in a random alleyway, Jazz breakdances to be urban, and they’re all introduced like we were supposed to know who they are. Their knowledge of everything and their ability to speak English is given the excuse of “we learned from the internet” even though they just arrived from space. Also BB is unable to talk due to a broken voice box, so he’s forced to talk in radio shows and songs. And then we get the overly long “searching for the glasses” scene.
If we didn’t have this useless scene, the movie would have been less than 2 hours. We go up and down Sam’s house, there’s a blackout from the Autobots being clumsy, they ruin the yard, and all while Sam’s parents are trying to break into his room and assume he’s masterbating. We get one scene that lingers, and it’s half an hour of nothing, until Sector 7 agents arrive out of nowhere to detain Sam for having a radiation frequency. This is done after the Decepticons found out Sam has the glasses… from Sector 7.
The head agent, Seymour Simmons (played by John Turturro) is… annoying. I don’t care for his character and I’m glad BB peed on him. But then again, maybe the point of his character is to enjoy the idea of him getting peed on. I don’t know. I don’t want to look into that kind of symbolism considering he's meant to be a Jewish Egyptian Catholic played by a 100% Italian.
The Autobots get Sam away from Sector 7, only to get captured themselves in the most stupid of ways possible. BB gets harpooned by a helicopter, and Optimus Prime tells the others to not engage, because they don’t want to harm humans. They’re not humans, they’re with Sector 7! Open fire!
We are sent to the Hoover Dam, and I have to explain Team C for a moment.
Team C is made up of Maggie Medsen and her hacker friend Glenn, with her friend involved strictly because he’s played by Anthony Anderson. I love Ant in Scary Movie 3 as the dreadlocks guy, but he doesn’t get much to work with here. All he does is eat a plate of donuts off screen and I guess that became a meme. His house getting raided by the FBI was also a meme for a while, all because Maggie wanted him to hack a Decepticon frequency she stole from the Pentagon for NO REASON.
Maggie is an Australian data analyst who wanted to stop the US from accidentally attacking other countries, so she wanted to prove it was aliens. Obviously, this means she has to steal a Decepticon frequency from the Airforce One hacking by plugging an SD card into a Pentagon computer and walking away. Meanwhile, the military knows about the aliens because they’re connected to Sector 7, but they refuse to communicate, all so we can waste another 30mins with Maggie adding nothing to the movie. Her actress, Rachel Taylor(known previously for Man-Thing) isn’t bad; she’s blonde with glasses and sort of hot. It’s just that her character has nothing to do until she and her friend end up in the same helicopter heading to the Hoover Dam as Sam and Mikaela. In fact, once we hit the Hoover Dam, she and Glenn are only in the movie to waste more time in some library area.
Now you might be thinking “what’s so important about the Hoover Dam?”
Well, Archibald found Megatron in the snow back in 1897(which is how his glasses were zapped), and Sector 7 was started by seven random guys in 1935 to bring Megatron to the US and hide him specifically under the Hoover Dam during its construction. This “hiding” is to have him under a small tunnel network that’s accessible by jeep and it’s not really hidden since there are always tourists. The filming had to be done early in the morning before tourists were allowed, which makes it funny how Megatron’s body is just sitting there, constantly needing to be cryogenically frozen. But the main reason was to build this dam AROUND the Allspark, which landed in the colorado river way back when. This is where a lot of confusion happens.
And I’m not just talking about how Megatron was reverse engineered to make modern tech.
The Allspark Cube is massive, and it doesn’t get shrunk down to a hand-held cube until BB is released from captivity during a military mutiny(with Captain Lennox threatening Seymour personally). Before this, the power of the cube is presented by having someone’s cellphone turned into a feral robot, because the spark causes robot life to emerge from electronics. Megatron wants this because it would allow him to spark life into anything and make more minions. But then this begs the question…
Why does the Allspark cause every new creation to be instantly in attack mode?
Like how the Decepticons couldn’t find the dam after knowing about Sector 7 and the glasses, this was never explained. But we do see Frenzy coming out of the purse to release Megatron from cryo-sleep and reveal the location for Starscream to fly in and start shooting missiles. I’m not a big Starscream fan, and he only gets one line in this movie, but HOLY SHIT he’s voiced by Charlie Adler. He was the Big Heads from Roco’s Modern Life, he was Ickis in Ahhhh! Real Monsters, he also played Cobra Commander a few times, and they did him dirty in this one. Same with Ironhide being voiced by Jess Harnell, who was Captain Hero in Drawn Together.
Less dirty, since Mojo peed on Ironhide and he said “you have a rodent infestation”, which he delivered beautifully.
A big fight breaks out as the Hoover Dam is invaded by Decepticons and so Sam grabs the Allspark and drives out of there with BB, to meet up with the other Autobots along an empty highway, and this leads us to the epic climax after Optimus kills Bonecrusher on the road. Maggie and Glenn fight off Frenzy in this weird library place and it’s treated as important because they have to send an airstrike call with morris code using a computer, but none of it makes sense and Frenzy knocks his own block off with his own shuriken for no reason. Paper fluttering was beautiful as shotguns blow up filing cabinets, but god is it pointless and stupid.
The last 30 mins is all one giant fight in a place called Mission City, which becomes a combat zone for absolutely no reason, other than Sam and the Autobots stop there to meet up with Captain Lennox… who was in the dam. Because there is no internet, the military is forced to use old radios that shouldn’t work at all, but they somehow do, and they are able to contact airsupport (again). Here, we have a big mess of activity, with a tank Transformer called Brawl coming in to shoot at Sam and Mikaela, but Bay changed his name to Devastator because he didn’t like Brawl. If you ask me: both names suck. Starscream comes in and also shoots missiles down on everyone, doing a surprising amount of damage because he blows off BB’s legs. Jazz tries to help by breakdancing and pulling the tank’s turret out of the way, forcing Devastator to transform as well.
Megatron finds Sam and chases him through an abandoned church, and up a million flights of stairs, which gets skipped over because Bay just wanted the shot of a bunch of stairs going upward. Mikalea gets into a towtruck and drags Bumblebee backward through the street, having him shoot his cannon at all fighting. I have to admit: this part is epic because it’s BB having his own rail shooter moment, with all of the practical effects blowing up around him. Lennox tries to have his own moment and steals a motorcycle to ride it straight into Starscream, jumps off, slides at like 60mph, and unloads a grenade launcher into his nuts and bolts. The only thing impressive about this was how his uniform survived such a terrible road rash.
There’s also a part when Sam runs by a Mountain Dew vending machine, and the Allspark randomly turns it into a feral robot, which leads to nothing at all. It’s just… there… so Mountain Dew can pay them.
Megatron corners Sam against the spires of the church, with Sam having his body practically dangle off of the edge of the church by his fingertips. This was THE MOST DANGEROUS stunt in the movie, because he’s actually on Michigan Central Station, which is 230ft high, and there was no safety net. Just a hip wire and Jesus. All to have a shot that didn’t need to exist because Megatron sweeps his sword across the roof, blows it up with a fiery explosion, Sam falls, only to be caught by Optimus Prime who then slides all the way down and takes half of the building with him.
The shots are amazing and the practical effects are worth their cost(kind of), but none of these scenes make any sense. Somehow, Megatron wanted the Allspark, so his bright idea was to blow it up with his sword. Genius.
And now… for the biggest disappointment.
Optimus Prime and Megatron square up to duke it out. We get pumped, we get a little speech, and then it cuts to EVERYTHING ELSE except for the two fighting. Excuse me, but we’re here for Optimus and Megatron to strut their stuff. But when they’re about to fight, we get Starscream running away, Devastator gets blasted by Bumblebee, and Sam hides in a broken sewer pipe nearby. Optimus falls down somehow and then trips Megatron who also falls down.
Optimus tells Sam to put the Allspark into his chest to prevent Megatron from getting it, and Megatron claws at Sam after tripping. But Sam quickly shoves the Allspark into Megatron’s chest cavity, overloading his power core and killing him instantly. That means this entire time, when Optimus was ready to sacrifice himself… all they had to do was shove it into Megatron instead.
The day is won, Bumblebee has his voice back (for no reason), Megatron’s corpse is thrown into the ocean (with a shot from the same aircraft carrier footage used in Pearl Harbor), Sam and Mikaela kiss on top of Bumblebee during sunset, and Optimus calls upon every Autobot floating around space to come to Earth because they like humans. And it’s because “humans are more than what meets the eye.”
Cue Linkin Park’s last good song as we hit the credits.
Blockbusters in the US have a very strange habit of celebrating the Fourth of July weekend with a movie about aliens attacking, and it follows the Fourth of July Weekend footsteps of War of the Worlds(2005), Men in Black(1997), and this tradition sort of started with Independence Day(1996). And like these other movies, you’re meant to shut up, eat your popcorn, drink your Halo flavored Mountain Dew, and turn your brain off.
This movie is one of the STUPIDEST things I’ve ever seen and also one of the most impressive when it comes to production. So many moments have me saying “this part must be CGI” and then I look it up and nope, it’s real people next to real explosions. That’s Shia actually about to be crushed by a flying car, that’s an actual low flying jet, that’s actually the Hoover Dam, that’s the actual Pentagon. They tried so hard to pretend this isn’t a military recruitment film by having the government have a Sector 7, but then the military is also against Sector 7 because of how slimy they are. You can see where the GI Joe element was merged into the film from the very first scene on Earth, because it starts with soldiers on a helicopter chatting about nothing.
This movie is the film equivalent of those toy guns that you’d get that have like 20 sound effects, with none of them being the sound of a gun and ALL of them are annoying. The dialogue is either a bad joke being repeated twice, someone screaming, Optimus Prime doing a monologue, or incoherent babbling. To be a fly on the wall when Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are forced to write a new scene after 2 or 3 words are spoken. The script has more sluglines than lines of dialogue, because it was more important to get a shot of a guy randomly washing his dog than it was to finish the thought. And even though the plot makes zero sense, from the Allspark existing, to how the glasses have the coordinates, to how Megatron’s been hidden in the Hoover Dam for 100 years… it still feels like an 80s Transformer’s movie.
The only thing missing is energon, which was the whole reason the Cybertron crisis existed in the first place!
Other than that massive blunder, this movie was not only an homage to original Transformers, but also a massive homage to the insanity that is Roland Emmrich, with both Independence Day and Stargate. I believe Bay’s goal was simple: do the things Spielberg and Emmerich would do to make money. And so he did, and it was a lot of money. The movie cost about $200M and made over $700M, with each project making more profit until The Last Knight(2017) was a boxoffice bomb(a loss of $100M). From making billions, to only losing a fraction of that, by using a toyline that was never praised for its story, that’s impressive.
I have to admit, the movie made me watch the original show to figure out what was so special. In short: nothing, the show is equally stupid, but in its own way. The theme remains the same in both where humans are worth saving, and so aliens want to work alongside humans as allies, as if we have this big team of Supermen made of metal, with both species able to learn from each other. And surprisingly, these movies caused people to buy more of the toys than ever, which is a plus for Hasbro. I watched the other movies out of curiosity and they’re basically the same thing but more incoherent with each installment.
I’m not sure if I’ll do a review of them, and it’s the same fatal flaw this movie and the original series had: nothing can be remembered as a detail, but I remember that it was dumb fun. Ironically, because of its visual focus and lack of depth, it still begs for more than meets the eye.
