Film Review - Transformers (2007)

Transformers is about Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) who is buying his first car, a used Camaro, but this car also happens to be an alien robot refugee from a planet called Cybertron, which has dried up due to a long war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, an artefact of their home world known as the Allspark has also crashed landed on Earth and both sides are racing to find it first.

I have to say that I really enjoyed seeing the film in the cinemas, there was a great vibe in the lobby and it carried over into the cinema, I feel sorry for those only seeing it on DVD, but while the audience was entertained, I had a few problems with the film.

One was the overabundance of teenage sex humour, I know the film was trying to bring in that audience, but there are also kids seeing this film and it was probably a little inappropriate to put masturbation jokes in a movie with children in your audience, this problem also appeared in Spider-Man 3 with the Emo humour in that film, personally I don’t find either brand of comedy very appealing or funny, just groan inducing.

Another main problem and possibly the biggest in my eyes, was the decision not to use Frank Welker as Megatron, as a fan of the original cartoon, Welker’s voice for Megatron IMO defined that character, in the same way that Peter Cullen’s voice for Optimus Prime did the same for that character, although Hugo Weaving did okay despite the voice modulation, I was still extremely disappointed that Welker wasn’t cast in the film.

Also in my opinion, I felt that the film was just not a good movie on its own terms nor did it do the cartoon justice, the first 30 minutes of the 86 transformers movie had great dialog, voice acting, animation and music, this effort was nothing more than a teen sex comedy with Transformers thrown in for action sequences instead of a proper Transformers film, which to me, is very disappointing.

On a more positive note, the film’s highlight was Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen reprises the role he played in the cartoon show and it is a real delight to hear him play Prime once more, if you’re a fan like me, then you will get definitely get chills but unfortunately, he’s also the only real spark the film has in it.

On the whole, the film was Ok with a good cinema experience behind it but Cullen was the only real bright spot and even if Welker had returned, its doubtful he would have made much of a difference, see this if you want, but keep expectations low.