I’ll keep this short… you may not want to read it if you want to see the movie.
Peter Cullen playing the voice of Optimus Prime, as he did in the original series, was the saving grace of this movie. Actually, I take that back. It was a huge highlight to be sure, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough (IMHO) to save it.
One pleasant surprise (at least for me) was the amount of screen time that the Transformers themselves got. From the previews I saw, I kind of feared that it would be bits and pieces of robot action interwoven with a large human-based story that would be largely uninteresting. I was happy to find that the robots actually are much more prominent than I expected, but I could have never expected the human part of the story to suck so badly. I don’t want to go off on this in too much detail, other than to say I honestly could not believe some of the scenes and lines they actually put in this flick, and they just kept coming, each time surprising me that someone would actually let that into a movie of this scope/budget/whatever.
I’m sorry that this sounds more than a tad negative, and I do realize that it might just sound like the classic old school fan nitpicking about the inconsistencies compared to what they’re used to, but that’s not really what I’m doing. I can appreciate when movie adaptations stray pretty far from the source material, as long as it’s done well overall.
One last point that I wanted to cover was the action scenes and CGI. While they were very fast paced and pretty rewarding (especially a lot of the robot battles), I really wish they would have stuck with the more classic “boxier” looks (yes, we know computers allow you to create a lot of detail - that doesn’t always mean you should), and not tried to make the fight scenes quite so “Batman Begins”-esque in their pace/speed/disorientation factor. Plus, no Soundwave. 
The bottom line is that I think classic Transformers fans should go see it (just don’t say I didn’t warn you), and new fans, well, I’m not entirely sure how many new fans this movie will be able to pull in.
7 Comments
I’m actually glad they didn’t include sound wave because a big ass radio isn’t very cool especially when you try to figure out how to move the thing.
The only other way to put him in would be to make him something else which would be worse than keeping him out IMO.
I don’t think they’d need to make him move in the radio form. That other thing that was originally based on his character didn’t really move when it wasn’t transformed, and that was fine.
soundwave was a narc.
i take it back, soundwave has really gone through some tough times lately.
Those were pretty funny. I still think he should have been in the movie, but actually maybe it’s best that he wasn’t - to avoid associating him with the cheesiness.
HFS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY9H8_nEPBA
All the mom blogs I read who went with their little kids liked it a lot. Hmmmm.