Saw it. Huge G1 fan but I recognized that this would be a good opportunity to "reinvent" the story while also sticking to certain key aspects, so i basically had let go of any sort of nostalgia and decided to just accept this as its own thing. As far as faithfulness goes it was more or less good, with most of the original series bots in there which was surprising to me, and with Optimus and his original voice it was great. But as far as the movie goes it was a bit of a stinker. I was very surprised that the best scenes were the ones with Shia Le-whatshisname; when the characters were involved and when the film actually took a minute to actually explore them it was terrific. Case in point, the scene where the kid is trying to hide the robots and a girl from his parents is not only hilarious and entertaining but brimming with the wonderful character eccentricities that make the robots endearing to us (while also presenting the absurd spectacle of giant robots roaming suburbia). They are NOT just toys, they have personality and feelings. But too often the film treated them as toys, as weapons, as spectacle, and there was way too many completely empty action scenes. Lots of explosions, lots of machine gun fire, and I found it very hard to tell what the hell was happening in any of the (many) action scenes.

Personally, I think Bay ruined what could have been a great film if they spent more time on the characters. Yeah, the robots should have had a bit more screentime, but if its just more scenes of them being shot at and smashing things then it doesn't really matter. I think its dissapointing because at times the film concentrated just on character relationships (whether human or robot) and in those moments the film really picked up, which only made the rest of the moments all the more uninspired. I also found it very hard to enjoy the action scenes on a purely superficial level because of Bay's absolutely wretched directing--i like a lot of his films and his style, but here he framed the action so closely and incoherantly that there was no communication to the audience as to what was actually happening onscreen. The robots also all looked the same--i could always tell who Optimus was because he was distinctly coloured but the robot fighting scenes, which should have been the highlighted spectacle, were just a mess beacuse it was just parts and gears flying around without any sense of what was happening. I STILL don't know how it ended--I mean i watched it but it was just shot so incoherantly that I really have no idea what happened. Bay's style is also very stale--Armageddon and Bad Boys, for example, are shot similarly, but here its just the same old things; the same music, the same sequences, the same shots, the same pomposity, the same overstated emotion; it just feels like Michael Bay on autopilot, almost like someone imitating Bay.

But I'm also glad I saw it. As pure spectacle, the notion of giant fighting robots is cool no matter the context, genre or competance of execution, and as a die hard Transformers fan it was always nice to see the references and to finally after all these years see these guys renedered in live action. I think the sequel will be much better since all the set-up stuff is done now. The original series was more science fiction while this film is more like Fast and the Furious with robots, but I like the way the ending set up a scenario that was more reminiscent of the situation depicted in the original cartoon. I went into this film expecting a dumb action blockbuster but I was secretly hoping that I would find that it was actually much more--unfortunately it was just as i expected. Okay to watch, captivating at moments where characters take center stage and not the explosions, but unfortunate that its not really worth a repeat viewing. 1986's Tranformers The Movie still stands as a million times better than this.