I managed to drag my ass out of the apartment today, got on the bike, rode downtown and caught the 3:00 showing of Transformers. I was totally expecting a bunch of snot nosed brats to be loading into the theater, now that its summertime. To my thrill I discovered most of the movie goers were 20-30 year old geeks like myself. And not packed.

Anyhow, on to the movie. I had little to no expectations for this film, which might have helped make it not so bad. While this wasn’t the Transformers I grew up and loved, it was definitely a VERSION of the Transformers.

This is how I figure it went down: Some guy was assigned to design the Transformers, and this guy had probably never seen an episode in his life. After researching it, he decides “These Transformers from the 80s suck. These new age ones they show on Cartoon Network at 5am are much better.” So he goes down to Target, sees the Transformers: Alternators line and goes with that.

The “transforming sound” and the fact Michael Bay managed to get Peter Cullen to reprise his role as the voice of Optimus Prime definitely helped a lot, as well as a few lines from the 80s movie - “One shall stand, and one shall fall.” during the Prime/Megatron battle. Speaking of Megatron, who was only in the film for like 30 mins, he totally sucked. He was a bigger ball of razor wire than the rest. Which is the first of two major problems I had with this movie. One, they didn’t stick to the original vehicles that the robots turned in to. The only ones that remained true were Optimus Prime as the semi, and Starscream as a jet. The other issue was that it was nearly impossible to make out the robots! A mishmash of metal, with no real robot form, especially when two were wrapped up in hand to hand combat. I would have been able to let the vehicle issue slide if the robots actually looked like robots!

A high point of this movie is smokin’ hottie Megan Fox who plays..um..a smokin’ hottie high schooler (I don’t even know what her character’s name is). I don’t think a soul out there believed she was supposed to be a junior in high school. I know I didn’t. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say Shia LaBeef-Curtains is a total dillhole, if for no other reason than he gets to make out with Fox at the end. Not to mention he gets to play Indy Jones’ son in the new Jones movie. Douchebag.

So how do I rate Transformers? Well..I guess I enjoyed it, but probably because I had no expectations whatsoever. If you want this movie to be awesome, it’ll suck. If you want to sit in the A/C for 144 minutes and watch a fun action flick on a hot summer day, it’ll work. Its an ok movie that I thought would be a lot worse. I guess you could say Transformers is more than meets the eye.