Transformers Review

The smart choice is the point of view. For its first hour this is a film about a teenager whose first car turns out to be alive, shot from his height and paced like a comedy, and Shia LaBeouf's flustered motormouth is genuinely good at carrying it. The arrival of Bumblebee, the backyard sequence with the parents, the sheer scale of a semi truck unfolding in a rail yard, these are the moments that made the film enormous.

Then the second hour arrives. The robot designs are dense clusters of moving shards with no readable silhouette, so in motion two grey machines fighting look like one grey machine, and the final battle through a city becomes noise. The military subplot in Qatar eats forty minutes and connects to nothing. The comedy is embarrassing, with a masturbation gag and a scene of the family fussing while the fate of the planet waits outside. Megan Fox is photographed the way the film photographs cars. Half a good movie.