You know how the plot goes along so "snappily?" Because there is no plot. Literally. All there is in Transfomers is a series of events.
A glaring moment for me was that kid and the Autobots are trying to find his grandfather's glasses so they can find some McGuffin, and then he and the hot chick get kidnapped by the government agents to the McGuffin, making the search for the glasses completely moot. The whole plot works in this way. It gives the characters a pretense of a goal which manages to fall into their lap without any relation to their efforts to achieve said goal. But the movie glosses this over and moves on to the next bit so swiftly that most people don't notice and everyone does not care.
I only watched the first Transformers movie back when I still had HBO and HBO was running it ad nauseum. I didn't want to see the movie because I had been a fan back in the 80's when I was a kid, but now that I'm an adult I realize that Transformers is dog shit. Seriously. The toys were finicky and not much fun to play with except as a kind of Rubic's Cube were you need to figure out how to change them into a robot and back again. The were much too shaky and flimsy as action figures. The cartoon was a glorified toy commercial with the kind of bland characterization, inane plots and juvenile humor you'd expect in a children's show that does not hold up when watching it later in life. There's just nothing good about the franchise. So a movie version was not the sort of thing I wanted to see and neither should anybody else, honestly. It's like if cutting a flap pf skin off your penis was a common practice and no one question the stupidity of letting a sharp knife near your junk. Wake up, people!
That said, the movie is actually a step down from the old cartoons and whatnot. For starters, the Transformers are effectively cameos in their own movie. The cartoon at least focused on the robots as characters with that kid being just a audience surrogate to explain shit. The movie barely covered the robots at all. The were just kind of there. They weren't developed at all as characters.
I could harp on the robot designs, but I think it's sufficient to say they are terrible because every robot looks like every other robot. The only distinctive members were Bumblebee since he had a lot of yellow on him and Optimus Prime because he had red and blue on him. I defy anyone to tell one robot from another. This is not helped at all by the robots not really being introduced to us as character as noted above. I think the movie would have fared better with fans if they'd cut down the number of robots to two, maybe three per side and actually gave them personalities. A distinctive look would have also helped, but if we actually gave a shit when Jazz died... or noticed he was in the movie in the first place... it would have been enough for old school fans to accept this interpretation.
But the real problem is the heavy handed plotting described above. Every plot point happens not organically as part of the story but because some screenwriting formula dictates and plot point needs to happen now. It's effective if you don't think about it, like how it's fucking impossible to learn a language from Ebay as it's not a language translation site. But if you think about it even a little, the plot looks very, very thin. It's not a solid story. We call a story solid if the events are believable and an organic consequence of the action of the characters. It's 'solid' because you can dig into it and illusion of reality, which all stories attempt to achieve, is maintained the deeper you go. Transformers has a very thin story that if you think of it even a little, even while you're watching, the illusion of reality just crumbles into so much smoke and mirrors. the events have less connectivity than paintings in an art gallery. You can go from one painting to the next at the Van Gogh exhibit, but that narrative really isn't there. This is what the narrative of Transformers is like.
So, yeah. I didn't like the movie. Didn't even bother with the sequels, because who cares about them? And don't even like the IP anymore anyway because it was always terrible.
Maybe someday someone will make a Go-Bots movie.
