TRANSFORMERS SO Much more than meets the eye!

All hackneyed quips aside, and there were a few (imagine Optimus Prime saying, “My bad…” –and he does-) this movie was an astounding piece of visual achievement. I was positive what I wanted to feel and what I wanted to see going in to the theater, and this movie delivered both, on a silver platter, perfectly. I grew up under the tutelage of the television smack dab in the decade that was the eighties: power ties and power toons to say the least, and I was raised to understand that robots could, would, and should turn effortlessly into cars, trucks, tanks, jets, guns, and radios. And you know what, the cartoon that was The Transformers took me there and never let my attention droop one bit… and so did, on every conceivable level, the film.
Oh sure, I was never once expecting anything in the realm of a tight plot, a well thought out story, or deep and meaningful character development, and even though there were some of the former, I knew that I pined for the beauty of a real robot becoming a real vehicle. And so it was. From the very instant a military helicopter hovered over the Qatar desert and, complete with cartoon sounds, changed its very form into a robot bent on destruction, my heart leapt in my ribs and I felt joy. Yes, the actors were just hammy enough to occupy an Easter buffet, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson both put forth strong representations of the military men they were,more or less, portraying. But you know what? The sign on the marquee said TRANSFORMERS, and that is sure as shellac what I was given.
As soon as we met Shia LaBeouf and his soon to be love interest Megan Fox (who, by the way, was given some gibberish back-story about a car-thieving father for sappiness sake and was more or less on screen as some wicked eye candy), I was actually quite impressed even more. Shia is the new go-to guy when a tweener is needed and he did a bang up job as Sam Witwicky and I have to say he really carried the character well. Oh, and if you missed it, he is a direct reference to the cartoon humans as well. Now Sam needs a car, and he gets one that turns out to be fully functional on its own nearly immediately after it smashes a yellow VW Bug it is on the lot with. Yup, the yellow soon-to-be newer Camero turns out to be Bumblebee and he is so darn cool.
Eventually, after a call goes into space form Bumblebee himself, we see a few meteors crash to earth and become, be their sheer scanning powers alone, Optimus Prime the Semi cab, Ratchet, Ironhide, and Jazz. All of which are super clean and quite shiny vehicles. Very nice. Not long after: the military end up destroying a scorpion Decepticon in the desert and take a broken-off tail section with them back to America, the government discovers transmissions emanating from the former scorpion that mention not only a secret government base designed to hide an earth-lost Megatron, but also the very All-Spark cube each Transformer is looking for,and some computer hackers join forces with Secretary of Defense John Voight and the rest of pretty much every other human character to assist the defending Autobots against Devastator, Starscream, Bonecrusher, and Megatron to save the planet. WHEW!
But oh, does it once loose your attention even for a second what with all of the humor and little side stories here and there? Not for a second. This movie is what all Summer Blockbusters ought to be and only Michael Bay could have done it justice… and boy did he.
Outstanding.This was the very essence of what a movie about TRANSFORMERS ought to be. I will see this one again.

Stew Miller