AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Fluke_Skywalker Plot; In the year 2005, the war between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons comes to a head when Unicron, a planet-sized Transformer, intervenes seeking the Autobot Matrix of Leadership.In the late Summer of '86, with my interest in toys waning and my interest in girls increasing (couldn't bring myself to say waxing in this context), I ventured into the air-conditioned comfort of Cinema North Five and watched what may just have been the denouement of my childhood as Optimus Prime is killed in favor of the next wave of Transformers toys. Over the years I've -rewatched a few episodes of the daily animated series, and as a collector of 80s toys I've recently purchased a G1 Sideswipe and Optimus Prime for my collection, but I had never re-visited Transformers: The Movie. My memories of the broad strokes remained, but the finer details (such as they are) were vague. I obviously remembered the death of Optimus Prime, I had been spinning the rock-infused soundtrack since the earliest days of MP3s and I knew that at some point Orson Welles showed up and ate a planet. What I didn't remember was that the 85 minute movie is almost non-stop action, that Prime isn't the only beloved character sent to the scrap heap and that the movie is a lot of fun.Not merely a standard episode blown up to feature length, the animation here is quite strong and of cinematic quality. The tone is also decidedly darker than the weekday series, with death and destruction on full display with no cheats. There's even a swear word or two. Adding additional gravitas are some familiar names (and their accompanying voices) such as Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Judd Nelson and the aforementioned Orson Welles. Set to the tunes of its rockin' soundtrack, Transformers: The Movie is a fun, fast-paced film whose original intent may have been to push the next wave of Transformers figures, but is in retrospect so much more. And it's better than any of Bay's increasingly nonsensical action catastrophes by a mile.

ikrani I really wanted to rate this one higher, really, I did, but there are just one too many things holding this movie back for me to call it anything more than "above average".The first main issue with this movie is how it mistakes "kill a whole bunch of people off" for "dark". There's a lot of character deaths in this film, most of them happening to characters that aren't established well enough for them to have much emotional meaning. I know, this was made for fans of the show, but this is also a feature film. It needs to stand or fall on its own, and fall this film does. Kinda hard.For the main problem with the film, you see, is tone. This movie goes from mess-your-drawers planet-eating monstrosity to kick-ass 1980s opening song in an instant, and the tonal whiplash HURTS, man. Then there's the moment where Galvatron walks in and he doesn't just MURDER, Starscream, he turns the dude into ash and then crushes the crown he was wearing, all from a blast with that Hanna-Barbara "shyoomp" sound effect attached to it. I get that it was something on the show, but this goofy sound instantly sucked all the menace out of Galvatron. Tell a good story first, appease raging fanboys like myself LAST. Finally, the story itself plays more like a three-part episode from the show than a movie. After Optimus's death, the movie just meanders from scene to scene with the Autobots trying to evade Galvatron while working their way towards their home planet Cybertron in order to stop Unicron from eating it. There's a lot of popcorn action, but roughly half of it involves. Shoot, the good guys only learn Unicron's name by sheer coincidence, in a subplot that's completely disconnected from the main one, on some planet with some kind of weird law system where the innocent are put to death and... I have no idea what happens to guilty, nor can I fathom it. Point is, that whole detour, again, comes off like the plot to a filler episode rather than a plot beat of a movie. Oh, and Unicron's defeat is a complete deus ex machina. His opponent never even fights him proper, he just opens this Matrix of Leadership thing and then Unicron blows up. Makes you wonder why previous Autobot leaders didn't go out and do that, you know, BEFORE Unicron set his sights on Cybertron.On top of that, Unicron himself manages to get progressively less threatening as the film goes on. When he starts, I was genuinely frightened of him as I watched him devour the screaming inhabitants of a planet and grind them up into primordial soup to power his veins. And then he wet himself when he realized he'd sent a tyrant off to collect the one thing that could destroy him, and then he transformed into his robot form and proceeded to get his eyes blown out and his head blow off, all while systematically shrinking as the animation severely downsized his scale in contrast to the "normal" sized Transformers. He had his moments, and he was certainly a threat worthy of a feature film, but overall I felt he was squandered in the end.By all rights, I should find this movie pretty forgettable. Outside of Galvatron icing Starscream, the death of Optimus Prime, and the sheer pants-darkening terror that was Unicron's first scene in the movie, there's nothing to this for me to really keep. I'm not a G1 Transformers fan. I grew up watching Armada and later checked out Transformers Prime, and this movie banks pretty heavily on its audience already being fans.That is, except for one thing: THE MUSIC. Holy crap, this movie has a soundtrack to rival the likes of Star Wars and Highlander in its sheer, magnanimous badassitude. As Team Four Star proved in their Bardock Abridged special, you could stick some of these kick-ass hair metal tunes over any kind of action scene and they would fit like a glove. Unicron's medley as he prowls across space and eats a planet is equally frightening as the scene itself is, and Optimus Prime's death is sold almost entirely on the music. Prior to that, Prime had maybe 2 scenes and no substantial character moments to speak of, so there's nothing to get attached to in the movie itself.I'd rate this movie as merely "above average", but this soundtrack is so awesome that I can't in good conscience rate it any lower than I did. If you're not a Transformers fan, just skip the movie and put on the soundtrack. I wasn't lying when I implied that it's one of the best movie soundtracks I'd ever heard.

SnoopyStyle It's 2005. Unicron is a planet-sized robot devouring robot planets. The evil Decepticons are in control of their home planet Cybertron while the Autobots try to mount an attack. The Decepticons ambush an Autobot shuttle. The Autobots are drawn into an all-out fight from the Autobot City. Optimus Prime and the Dinobots arrive. Optimus is killed in an ultimate battle with Decepticon leader Megatron. Megatron is severely damaged and Starscream takes over command of the Decepticons. Optimus passes the Autobot Matrix of Leadership to the new leader Ultra Magnus. Megatron is casted off and found by Unicron which transforms him into Galvatron. Galvatron travels back to Cybertron where he destroys Starscream and takes back command of the Decepticons.This is basically the Saturday morning cartoon extended into an hour and a half while killing off a lot of the Autobots. I'm going to be a little bit cynical and a lot realistic. They wanted to get rid of the old characters so that the kids could buy the new toy figures. The story is a mess with very specific goals. It's out with the old and in with the new. The story doesn't flow as much as rambles on and on introducing new characters or new forms of old characters. It's an important film but only for fans of the show.

Mr-Fusion If the argument can be made that the original "Transformers" cartoon is about as commercialistic as they come (it surely can), then TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE is that notion taken to an extreme. To remedy the drop in sales of some of the action figures, Hasbro decided to just kill off those characters on the big screen and make room for new ones. That is some cutthroat boardroom strategy, right there. In any event, we got a decent movie out of it. Or at least a peculiar one. The voice cast is an eyebrow-raiser (Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Orson Welles, the Micro Machines guy), but there's at least the heightened production values that are an improvement over the quality of the TV show. And I've grown oddly fond of the movie's soundtrack - awful metal and all – but it's also got one of my favorite Weird Al songs on it . . . seemingly at random! That tickles me. It's pretty cool, taps into the whole childhood thing pretty well (even with the slaughter of all those non-selling characters) and it doesn't induce nausea like the Bay movies do.7/10