Thanks to the wonders of home theater, I now have the opportunity to begin catching up on all the films I missed this summer in the theater...

I went into Michael Bay’s Transformers with low expectations. I have a good friend that hated it, and several others who enjoyed it quite a bit. I didn’t know what to expect. The tone was decidedly different than I anticipated, and that was a good thing. This film didn’t take itself seriously, nor should it have. It’s about giant robots that turn into SUVs, helicopters and tanks. This is not the most high minded of material from which to begin. Yes, the dialogue was bad at points, but everyone involved seemed to be conscious of it. Yes, the action sequences were over the top and sometimes too frenetic to follow, but the impact was still there. No, I didn’t get particularly attached to any of the characters, but I found most of them enjoyable. I found the interaction between the robots and the humans to be funny and entertaining.

Transformers felt a lot like Independence Day to me. I loved ID4. It was cheesy, far fetched and melodramatic, but I loved it for what it was: a fun, summertime action movie spectacle.

Transformers isn’t an earth-shattering piece of filmmaking, but I did find it quite entertaining...