Okay, I’m doing these movies because I like doing themes, unless you check out last week. On my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review, I promised to review these films by Michael Bay.

I recently hear another critic who said that the Internet hating Michael Bay is as original as putting a caption under a cat. I think I rephrased that for another article that I wrote. Here’s the thing: I like Michael Bay. There are things I don’t like about him, but I fully enjoyed The Rock, Armageddon, The Island, and I even liked Pearl Harbor. Yeah, I said it.

Like it or not, the guy does attempt to put a lot of awesome on the screen. The problem is that it is difficult to balance a mature storyline in there, and I honestly doesn’t think that Michael doesn’t try because it is difficult to take stories like this seriously.

In this case, Michael Bay deliberately chose to take a toy from the eighties that was animated and actually succeeded in making it live-action. I’m certain there were several people who said that it couldn’t be done, but thanks to the power of computer generation, it worked.

At least, I think this worked. I remember leaving the theater very pumped after seeing this film, and it brought back all my memories of The Transformers as a kids. Seriously, I loved watching The Transformers animated series when I was a kid, and I even tried to create some of my own. It was interesting watching a show where the characters were not human, and the animation quality for a “kid’s cartoon” looked beautiful to me. The show had a lot of action, and since they were robots, it was okay if they got hurt, at least until the movie, the animated one.

As a kid’s cartoon, the show had a huge cast of characters that were designed to sell toys. Yeah. It is pretty clear that the first move in adapting the cartoon into a film was less robots, more people. On the cartoon, there was only two humans named Sparkplug and his son Spike, who were the human contacts for the robots. There is kind of some that with this with Shia LaBeouf, but I’ll talk about the human element later.

On the cartoon, the good Autobots waged their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons. I forget why they were fighting, but it had something to do with energy. I don’t know where the Autobots got their energy, but the Decepticons would steal it from anywhere. For some reason on the cartoon, the Autobots had an HQ on Earth to protect the humans. I guess humans were okay with that.

In the movie, the humans don’t like the robots being on this planet, good or bad. This is a bit more realistic, I think, and the interaction is typical for big epic films like this. That is, they don’t trust the big alien robots at first, until they have to.

Now, the big epic is what is wrong with Michael Bay films, because they tend to be made for the short attention span. In the case of The Transformers, it works, because I get the feeling that if the Computer Generated robots were on screen for too long, they would look fake. A lot of quick movement helps.

Okay, let’s talk about Shia LeBeouf and Megan Fox. I actually liked his performance, and thought it portrayed the awkwardness of adolescence pretty well. However, Megan Fox could have been anyone, and I’m not certain I like her look.

Yeah, it isn’t deep, but dang it, it is a film where giant alien robots come to Earth and fight. The ending scene is just plain awesome and this plot is full of holes. What can I say, it is a guilty pleasure, even though it is surely not Oscar material.