More Than Meets The Eye

We watched the Transformers movie last weekend with some relatives, tickets courtesy of one of the cousins. Oh boy, what a mixed feeling we had after we got out of the theatre...

The good: The special rendered effects were awesome. Fantastic Four's effects looked like child's play compared to Transformers. The movement and transformation of the robots seemed natural (robots... natural... I'm probably contradicting myself...) and they even threw in matrix-like-slow-motion action scenes (robots in slowmo of course, not Keanu Reeves). Ok, I think that's about it for the good part.

The bad: I grew up watching the ORIGINAL transformers cartoon, so I'm probably a little prejudice about this, but everything else about the movie (except special effects) were bad >:| with the following in particular:
1. Nothing about the robots' appearances look like the original ones, except Optimus Prime's head and Bumblebee's yellow coating. Megatron looked just like Starscream who looked just like Jazz (especially in the confusion of big battles).
2. The background story was majorly revamped. Now there's a Cube (which can transform from a BIG cube to, er, small cube) and people can use its power to create Decepticons.
3. Lots of screen time wasted on the human actor (who isn't handsome) and his cheezy teenager-falls-for-sexy-girl-does-stupid-things-then-acts-heroic adventure.
4. Missing iconic Transformers theme song. Unforgivable.

Thus, I conclude and give the movie a 7/10 purely because of the amazing special effects. I actually don't mind watching the movie again for the effects :p

The movie obviously gives much room for a sequel (or many sequels) so we'll see how the director redeems himself in the future (assuming he isn't slaughtered by Transformers fanatics by now).