[If you haven’t seen this movie yet, there may be spoilers. -TAO]

Being a grungy gritty child of the 90's, I fully expected to be making fun of this movie the entire time it occupied the screen. And though I was right, because nothing good ever came of the 80's (present author included), this actually wasn't such a horrible way to spend an hour and a half. By no means am I a Transformers fanatic, I only own a few Transformers toys and comics because they look so freaking cool sometimes! So what I'm saying is, if you take David Bowie and giant robots that transform into microscopes too seriously, turn away now!

The film's tag-line is an appropriately generic 80's squib reading, "Beyond Good. Beyond Evil. Beyond your wildest imagination." Holy crap! Sexy Redheaded androids with guns, riding a giant transforming caterpillar!? Well, not quite, but at least the infamous "More than meets the eye." tag-line is definitely an accurate description for these guys. You never know what crazy illogical ability a TF can have! Hell, a few minutes into the film, the 30-foot Megatron transforms into a 3-foot pistol, Hotrod shoots down a humongous spaceship with one small laser-beam (wow, I'd love to see what Optimus can do when he's pissed off!), and an Insecticon eats about 4 times his own body-mass in metal and doesn't grow an inch! Also, midgets! Classic "sharks with laser-beams strapped to their heads"! A flying Triceratops! There's also the mandatory crappy little kid (he's a good voice-actor though), but in-spite of him, I think this is pretty awesome so far (you know, If I were 8 years-old).

Now, it's obvious that this movie is aimed at people who already know who the Transformers are, so there's understandably-minimal characterization. The benefit is that this thing breaks right into action! At all times on-screen, something must be glowing, exploding, levitating inexplicably, or worse: trying to bring-out the humanity in completely inhuman things.

I don't know what's funnier, female robots wearing make-up or this movie's soundtrack. Fem-bots is already a strange concept in and of itself (where did the boobs come from? Implants?) but whoever was in charge of choosing the music was either drunk or still living in the 80's! ...Oh, I guess he couldn't help that, but come on man, does it really make sense to play Richard Marx when there are murderous robots trying to shred a little kid? And what's with the David Bowie-ish ho-down the Autobots had like minutes after Ultra Magnus was killed!? But there are some metal-moments that totally make the action feel more epic than it really is (I count exactly 2, lol), though a lot of the film has video-game-type filler music. Meh. Also, I could have sworn I heard a pan-flute!

The grittier tone of this movie is a breath of rank and sickly air, and I love it. Most of the cartoons I've seen from this movie's era are filled with sunshine and unicorns, even when it's about half-naked barbarians and demons slaughtering each other on a daily basis. Though this isn't exactly The Crow, or anywhere near it, it does still feel like something you'd see on Adult Swim, if they updated the PG-13 dialogue of course. They'd probably have to add some robot sex too so today's kid can relate to it. Uh, not because today's kids have sex with robots (I don't know about Japan though), but because they fantasize about robots having sex with other robots. Yeah, that's better.

I learned a lot of things about Transformers from this film, like that apparently they can be choked-out! Why do TFs breathe heavily after running or fighting? I didn't know they needed to breathe to live. Also, why are they programmed with pain-receptors!? If I were a robot, the first thing I would do is shut down that part of my cy-brain. And apparently, when Devastator jumps and is transforming in mid-air, it is possible to stop the process by pounding the ground repeatedly. WTF!? Does anyone think it's weird that Arcee and Hotrod look like brother and sister yet they seem to have sparks between them? Unicron totally has an evil goatee!, and lots of spiky things inside him. And apparently, despite having eyes, they have no optical-sensors behind them that I can see. They serve no purpose other than to be fragile windows to his interior where anyone can just waltz in and blow him apart.

Well, anyway, if you take anything away from this film, it should be that Arcee is fucking hot.

________