One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall

We saw The Transfomers last night and it sucked. OK, it was slightly better that I expected so let’s get the good part out.
Optimus, who was voiced by the original Optimus, Peter Cullen, recited the above line and Rosey Posey said she thought she saw my eyes tear up. That was cool albeit totally pointless and a bone thrown at us nostaligic Transformer fans. The sell-out I am, I happily took the bone.
The other plus was the action scenes were really, really good.
So the negatives? It was mostly Shia LeBeaouf and his antics with his car, and getting the attention of a girl for like an hour before any action set in. There were lots of stupid little sex jokes that could have been dropped to make the movie more kid-friendly. On that same line of thinking, the violence could have been toned down a bit without any loss to the movie to give it a PG rating. I hated the sex humor although The audience laughed hysterically at it while I just rolled my eyes. So what do I know?
There also tghe usual mini-public service announcements strung throughout taking pokes at our government and Bush and what-not. Yawn.
The story was terrible, boring and incoherent. Many of the situations could have been resolved with common sense. For example, there is one action scene that ensues because instead of putting Sam and his Lady Friend inside his cab and driving away with the rest of the Autobots, Optimus decides to put them on his shoulder and climb under a bridge…and drops them. Why? What for? No one knows.
The robots looked kind of icky. Michael Bay’s attempt to recreate this alien-robotic-life form and thought the boxy Transformers looked “unrealistic”. OK I got that. But um, there is nothing realistic about Transformers to begin with (why must we take everything so seriously lately?) He should have established some middle grown and made them look slightly more like the guys we remember. They were literally confusing to look at-just jumbles of metallic spikes. Rosey Posey was kavetching for two hours afterwards about why did they feel the need to give Megatron pointy teeth: “To show how evil he is while he eats small bunnies?”
Mostly, something was seriously missing with the Optimus character. I am still not sure what it was. He seemed slightly ditzy and silly or something.
The movie is obviously a set-up for a sequel.
I give it a C-.