Funny detail - they were Mountain Dew cans that he was firing!
I loved the movie. The action and effects were absolutely jaw-dropping, and I loved how stupid most of the movie was - it truly went above and beyond “not taking itself too seriously” with wonderfully lame one-off jokes, pee-pee jokes, Mom and Dad, and so on. It was so stupid that it didn’t distract from BIG ROBOTS BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER!
Well put! Shit, I think I’ll go see it again this weekend.
BTW, that wasn’t a computer that came to life in that scene. It was an Xbox 360.
After hearing the first line of narration in the movie – “In the beginning, there was THE CUBE” – did anyone else think of Time Cube?
Saw the movie yesterday. I came out a little… deflated, maybe. A lot of it was really great, but all the camp and cheesy humor undercut the excitement. Not that I’d want a Transformers film to be deadly serious, but I wasn’t expecting quite this much broad slapstick comedy.
Good:
Bad:
Overall, I think it would have been a much better movie if they had focused on the Transformers themselves, and cut the human cast way down. Less slapstick, more giant robots shooting missiles at each other.
this 51-year-old aunt and her 12-year-old nephew were in agreement: totally awesome flick!
it rocked!!!
its sequel heaven, gang. trust me on this! megatron WILL return.
it was a tad heavy on the teen cheese, altho labeauf did a fine job (that kid is gonna go places. can’t wait to see what he does as indy jones’ son).
like others have posted, some of the action sequences didn’t need to be two inches from my eyeballs (and we sat waaaaay back in the upper seats!), but, like Orual, i was too busy watching Duhamel to mind too much. oh my, my, my… 
where the heck have i seen him before???
In the name of Og, why did you have to mention that? I need a Brill-O™ pad for my brain now…
Scubaqueen , Josh Duhamel is Danny in the TV show, “Las Vegas.”
It was just what I wanted from a summer blockbuster, and well worth the price of admission. We’re definitely going to see it again.
Oh, like it’s my fault they left that sitting there… 
What you said. I think the crowd in my theatre also didn’t help the experience. They applauded at the end, but no cheering or clapping when Bumblebee transformed, when Optimus Prime showed up, when Prime and Megatron first started fighting, when Megatron bitched out Starscream. If you’re seeing this moving this soon, that kind of stuff should delight the shit out of you.
Honestly, I think the movie just needs some tightening up. For example, right when Prime and Megatron first start facing off, it cuts away to the soldiers doing something or other. NO! I want to see Optimus Prime and Megatron kick the shit out of eachother, for 10 minutes at least, with no interruption.
That said, I’m probably going to go see it again. The effects really are fantastic, and the depictions of the Transformers themselves couldn’t have been much better (really Volkswagen, what were you thinking??).
I agree COMPLETELY! The crowd in my theater didn’t even clap at the end. Of course, I’m in very very rural Kentucky, so maybe it just didn’t “click” with most of the people there. We (my friend and I) were the only people who were there because we think Transformers kick ass, not just because there’s nothing better on. 
And how cool was it that Optimus Prime and megatron had their classic G1 weapons (albeit slightly modified): the mace and the energy axe.
Transformers may very well be the perfect Michael Bay movie. The man has finally found the precise formula with which to express his creative soul, and his joy is evident in every frame of the movie. This is the film of a man at peace with himself. Transformers takes us on a journey to the heart of Michael Bay’s personal universe, and that heart is made of giant robots pounding the crap out of each other until they explode.
This is one of the most perfect examples of “plot as Macguffin” I can recall. Events and characters are sketched out with the bare minimum amount of detail necessary to lead into the next scene; necessary genre conventions-- the love interest, the comic relief-- are tagged only lightly in passing, or even ignored altogether. Bay is secure in the knowledge that the audience wants the exact same thing he does. The only important goal is to reach the point where the giant robots throw down on each other. There is a beautiful purity about this movie.
One of the most remarkable things is the number of objects in this movie that: do not explode. Remember, this is a Michael Bay movie! Yet we are treated to lengthy scenes of the Pentagon, Air Force One, and Hoover Dam-- none of which even remotely explode at any time! While fighting Barricade, Bumblebee was actually knocked into a giant gasoline tank, denting it, and it did not explode! The dam contained both Megatron and the cube everyone was fighting over, and somehow it did not explode! I found myself saying, “Michael? Haven’t we forgotten something? You forgot to blow up the dam, Michael. Shouldn’t it be exploding right about now, in a huge string of massive fireballs, sending billions of tons of water and jagged concrete pouring down, engulfing a fleet of helicopters hovering in the valley, and then the helicopters burst into flame and explode, while all the characters run for their lives just ahead of the exploding flood, screaming and wisecracking every step of the way?” And Michael just smiled gently, and said, “Let’s just skip ahead to the part where the robots fight, shall we?”
I have only two complaints: [spoiler]First, I really didn’t ever need to consider the possibility of Autobot urination. Seriously, they’re giant alien robots, they don’t need to show disrespect by peeing. Don’t ever do that again.
Also, there was a definite excess of pornstaches among the supporting characters. Blackout’s holographic pilot had one. Barricade’s holographic officer had one. When the covert agency guy with the briefcase showed up at the Pentagon, I was totally expecting him to be a Decepticon too just on the basis of his pornstache. But then, I was also expecting Jon Voight’s Secretary of Defense character to be evil, just on the basis that he was played by Jon Voight.[/spoiler]
Terrifel, the New Yorker made some similar points about Bay. So you may be on to something.
I don’t mean to repeat myself, but I was surprised to feel the reverse. Aside from Bumblebee fighting the police car in a short scene (which must have been more than an hour into the movie), we didn’t get any of the robots fighting each other until [by my estimate] the last 20 minutes or so - and that’s in a 2-hour-and-20-minute movie. And the military and the kid kill Megatron, not Prime. They paid far more attention to the human element than was necessary, although in some respects they handled that side of the movie much better than I expected.
Same here. If anything, the Transformers were used surprisingly sparingly. I’d be willing to bet that the donut-eating hacker guy (a comic-relief sidekick within a throwaway subplot) had more screentime than Megatron.
Well, that was just my overall impression based on one viewing. I’m not saying that there weren’t large stretches of film featuring nothing but people, just that Bay didn’t invest much concern in those scenes except as generic packing material to provide some rough semblance of plot. In any case, they didn’t distract me from the robots, and that’s the important thing.
And for my money, guys with huge guns fighting giant robots is practically as good as giant robots fighting each other.
I’m not saying those scenes were handled with any great care or anything. Just that they occupied a large portion of the movie. As you noted, there were some really insignificant human characters who received more time and development (or whatever you want to call character development in this thing) than the Transformers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason for that were simple budget constraints. Those CG models looked mind-bogglingly intricate. Every second that a Transformer was on screen, let alone actually transforming or blowing things up, probably ate up tons of money. So ultimately it’s a lot cheaper to have one of your human actors run around to decode a disc or whatever, rather than have a Transformer accomplish the same goal while flying around and fighting other Transformers. I bet the script was written with an eye on saving as much of the effects budget as possible for the big battle at the end, and that’s where all the money went. No doubt the sequel will have a proportionately bigger budget, and we’ll see more robot fight time onscreen as a result.
I take it you did not notice that those were the SAME people? The holograms were identical to the Sector Seven dude with the briefcase. That was supposed to be the tip-off that Sector Seven has dealings of some sort with the decepticons.
Allegedly, each frame of animated transformer took 38 hours of rendering time. Ironhide’s guns alone had more moving pieces than any (other) individual transformer.
No! I totally missed that. Are you sure they were the same guy? I don’t get how the Decepticons would even know what that guy looked like before Frenzy managed to infiltrate Sector Seven.