I saw the film last night and in my opinion it was "less than meets the eye."
Sure its visually pretty, and they got the right voice actor to play prime, but thats about where the good things end. The movie was in desperate need of exposition, the audience needed a reason to invest themselves in the story, or at least a way to understand some of what was going on. What little explaination there is came an hour too late and was done away with in a simple undisguiesed 30 second plot dump from prime. The characters felt rushed and underdeveloped, only bumblebee gets any sense of personality. The B plot, which took place inside the department of defense, seemed unnecessary, and only seemed to fullfil Micheal Bay's fetish for control rooms in his movies (Badboys, The Rock, Armageddon). The MacGuffin that sets the plot in motion, isn't given any development and is consitantly refered to by several different names, which might cause confusion in some audience members. The dialog is all cliche one liners and relies heavily on evoking cheap laughs or canned heat from the audience, and the use of slapstick and farce was far too prominant for my tastes (for example bumblebee urinating on an offensive government agent).
The film took a great deal of liberties from the original source material, however that could have been forgiven, if the films writers and directors had taken the time to craft a decent piece of cinema, rather than cashing in on a pre-existing market base of twenty-somethings who grew up on a steady diet of Energon Cubes.
