Transform And Roll Out (Spoiler)

It's a very Zen-like moment when you hear the voice of Optimus Prime utter the opening monologue. Instantly you're taken back to a time when the world was a clear place. When Autobots were good, Decepticons were evil, every sentient being had a right to exist, and Sky Channel carried the single best cartoon of the eighties.

You hope the live action movie doesn't impact that romantic idea, and still you want it to be upgraded to 2007 standards. With all the CGI, professional soundtrack, Hollywood summer blockbuster production values, vast media exposure and multi-thread merchandise (toys, comics, video game) you can shake a stick at. And thankfully Transformers The Movie does exactly that.

I'm not going to reiterate the movie's plot, and instead we'll just focus on what made the movie great in the theater: the first encounter with Optimus, the interaction between Sam, Mikaela (and Bumblebee), actually the first encounter with Mikaela, the Camaro 2008, the Deceps Blackout, Barricade, and Starscream, Prime kicking ass and taking Bonecrusher's head, Megatron ripping Jazz in two.

You have to appreciate the humour in the movie, which is solid gold. Anthony Anderson doing the Matrix brings the funny. Bumblebee being better at picking up Megan Fox than Shia Leboeuf is just too much. And the Witwicky mother trying to be the understanding parent for an insecure teenager, simply hilarious.

There are some flaws though. The action scenes are MTV-style, as in much too fast to actually see what's going on. The movie moves intermittently from day to night even within the same scene, making it seem like either the scene in real-time would take really, really long, or the director couldn't get the actors to finish their grimaces in time. And like most cult franchises to movie adaptations, the hook of the original had to be Hollywood-ized to make it more tenable to the average movie-goer. Yes, Transformers is definitely a good movie to go to, even for someone who doesn't know TF from the past, but the Autobots and Decepticons don't get nearly enough screentime or dialogue to flesh out their characters, which is the point of the franchise anyway.

The problem is that for all the good things in the movie, it didn't need to be a Transformers movie. Apart from the names, the premise and some of the leitmotifs, anything in the movie could easily have been Go-Bots, or G.I. Joe. Or even the Ghostbusters.

• Will go to the movie again: no, probably not. Can't get the same reaction from the crowd on a post-premiere viewing.
• Will buy the DVD: absolutely. Day it comes out.
• Would go see a sequel: depends if they're gonna focus more on the Transformers themselves next time.