I'll admit I have dual biases. Biases which are in direct conflict. On one hand, I grew up loving the Transformers, and to this day consider Optimus Prime a personal hero on par with Atticus Finch or Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, Michael Bay sucks. I mean he really sucks. Excluding The Rock, has he done anything worthwhile? Well, I suppose now that Transformers is out, the answer is, surprisingly, yes.
Rather than let Autobots and Decepticons fight to the death with nary a human around to ask "...um, wha?" the film focuses on the military response to a "Non-Biological Extra-Terestrial" invasion. It's a wise choice, lending at least a modicum of credibility to a franchise that is, essentially, the world's longest toy commcercial. (The film was, in fact, co-produced by Hasbro). Still, no one goes to see Transformers -- or, hopefully, any Michael Bay film -- for things like character arcs and plot points. No, we go to Transformers to see big robots kicking the crap out of each other. And on this score, the film delivers.
The plot, for what it's worth, basically revolves around Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), the grandson of a little known explorer who went blind and insane after some unpleasantness in Antarctica. This unpleasantness, it turns out, was none other than Megatron, leader of the Decepticons; the easiest analogy for the uninitiated is to say that Megatron is the Devil to Optimus Prime's God, a former comrade who has subsequently fallen from grace and amassed a team of likeminded Decepticons to wage war against Optimus and his Autobots. Megatron came to earth in search of the All Spark, a cube which bestows sentience to any mechanical device, and which is the only remnant of their destroyed planet Cybertron. Optimus and the Autobots have arrived to protect humankind from Megatron and to find the All Spark before he or any of the other Decepticons are able to. The coordinates of the All Spark have somehow been encoded onto the late Witwicky's glasses, which Sam has been trying to sell on eBay to raise money for a car.
And so on and so forth. What really matters is whether or not Bay makes good on the Autobot-Decepticon action. For the first half of the film, none of the Transformers are given much onscreen time, save for Bumblebee, Sam's Camaro. But once the entire team of Autobots roll out, the action steadily escalates. Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Robert Kurtzman at least make an attempt to characterize the Autobots, giving them qualities not far removed from their previous 1980s cartoon incarnations. But the Decepticons, who are not introduced until the film's final act, are nearly indistinguishable from one another. The new designs and fast action don't help matters much, and you'll probably find yourself taking a couple seconds to orient yourself with each new battle, reminding yourself which robot is the good guy.
But like Professor Xavier and Magneto in The X-Men, it's the binary opposition between Optimus and Megatron that gives the film its heart. It does make the same mistake the original 1986 film made (making Optimus noble to a fault, but not a particularly good fighter), which could be more easily forgiven if the characters and backstory had been more fully developed. But then again, I went with someone who had never watched the show and who had relatively low expectations for the film, and she ended up liking it even more than I did. (She is a decent arbiter of good movies, despite her admission that she only came to see "robots and explosions.") Regardless, I still contend that little in-jokes for the faithful (most obviously, a yellow VW Beetle to which Bumblebee doesn't take very kindly) give the film much of its charm.
The movie does try a little too hard to explain some of the logical gaps from the original cartoon (the Transformers can adapt to the form of whatever mechanical device they see and analyze, hence the reason alien robots look like earth cars) and does feature a couple too many moments of cheesy action movie humor (and this is cheesy by both action-movie and 80s-kid standards), but is ultimately so damn entertaining that it doesn't really matter. The special effects are phenomenal, and the performances by Shia LaBeouf and especially John Turturro as a special agent on a bit of a power trip are surprisingly strong for a film of this caliber. And after the lackluster Spider-Man and Fantastic Four sequels, it's nice to see a big budget action franchise film that doesn't buckle under its own weight (although, I am in the minority of filmgoers who thought Pirates 3 was excellent).
It's very rare that this kind of film truly rises above its genre. X-Men 2 is one example I can think of. Superman Returns, also by Bryan Singer, is another, although that was an entirely different approach to the action film, and was unfairly maligned (much like Ang Lee's underappreciated Hulk) by an audience expecting less visual poetry and more Things Go Boom. Considering that, I can forgive Transformers for its ocassional concessions to cliche and rather cursory (re: half-assed) attempt at characterization and savor it for what it is: just the kind of big, brash, mindless entertainment the summer is known for producing.