I've been playing with Transformer toys since the beginning, loved the cartoon series and animated movie, but have mostly loathed what Michael Bay has done to my beloved franchise. His first movie was decent, the second appalling, the third passable, and when I left the movie theater after watching this fourth installment, my general feeling was, "Whatever." Being a little hard of hearing, I couldn't hear much of the dialog and was seriously confused about what was going on (not that Mr. Bay seems to worry much about telling a coherent story). I had been meaning to get back around to seeing it again at home where I could watch it with subtitles, and I was finally able to do just that. This time, I paid very close attention to try to understand the story and was rather surprised to discover that there was a very nice story that played out in a relatively orderly and logical manner, but with enough unanswered questions to leave you wondering where they might take the story in subsequent installments. Being all too familiar with Michael Bay's brand of humor and obsession with never-ending battle sequences, I had adjusted my expectation and found myself, overall, quite enjoying the film. I liked (or at least, didn't hate) many of the characters, including the main actors. There were also some very cool transformations and special effects. My main gripe with the movie (and I still have many of them) is that Michael Bay just doesn't know when to quit - this movie is entirely too long. He's made the same mistake before. The action sequences are so frequent and so long that I end up getting simultaneously bored and traumatized (never imagined that would be possible). If he could just scale back on the incessant action and ridiculous humor, I might start to actually form a moderately positive opinion of him - but I continue to hope that they'll hand the directing reins to someone (pretty much anyone) else.
