I posted how big things break my brain on the blog, and wrote about it on Tumblr too. Then someone asked, "what about the Transformers movies?" And that's when I realized that in all these years, I'd only ever watched the first movie from 2007. Just that one. So I told myself, let me sit down, watch all five Michael Bay films back to back, and see whether the giant robot thing would finally click for me the way the MonsterVerse did.
Verdict before I even start breaking it down: it didn't click the same way. But the marathon wasn't useless either. Let me get into it.
Transformers (2007): The one that actually works.
This one takes the crown, no argument. The story actually makes sense from start to finish, which sounds like a low bar until you watch the other four and realize how rare that is in this franchise.
Shia LaBeouf is the reason this film holds together. Sam Witwicky isn't some chiseled action hero pretending he's built for this. He's sweating, he's panicking, he's confused as hell, and that's exactly correct. If somebody told me my car could turn into a 15 foot alien robot and there's a whole war coming to wipe out the planet because of it, I wouldn't be calm either. I'd be shouting "what do you mean my car is alive" the whole movie too. LaBeouf grounds the chaos around him because he plays a normal person reacting like a normal person, and that's something the other films lost almost completely.
Megan Fox as Mikaela was fine. Not the deepest character ever written, but she wasn't a problem either. The film doesn't lean on her for much beyond "love interest who can also fix engines", and honestly that's enough for what the story needed.
The action and the CGI holds up too. You can see that, especially in the Mission City battle where the robots actually look like they're interacting with the environment around them instead of just smashing through it.
The film made over 700 million dollars worldwide on a budget of 150 million, which tells you it wasn't just me who thought this thing worked. People showed up, and people kept showing up for the sequels, even after the quality dropped off a cliff. We'll get to that.
Plot: 7.6. CGI: 9. This is the one Transformers movie I'd actually rewatch without rolling my eyes.
Revenge of the fallen (2009): Where the wheels came off.
This one is weak. Genuinely weak.
The plot is a mess. Too many threads pulling in too many directions, too much shouting, too many characters competing for screen time without earning any of it. You can tell the writers had a deadline and not a clear story. Even the action, which should be the one reliable thing in a Michael Bay movie, gets buried under the noise of everything else happening at once.
And then there's Skids and Mudflap. These two robots talk in exaggerated slang, can't read, and one of them has a gold tooth. The comic relief just lands as lazy and a little embarrassing.
The cast tried. The returning leads gave what they could, but a good cast can't save a script that doesn't know what it wants to be. The jokes are hit or miss at best, the pacing drags despite all the chaos on screen, and somehow this is also the longest film in the franchise up to that point.
What's wild is despite all that, the box office went up. This one made over 836 million dollars worldwide against a 200 million dollar budget, comfortably outgrossing the first film. Numbers don't always tell you about quality. Sometimes they just tell you people trusted the brand enough to show up anyway.
Plot: 4. CGI: 8.7, because even when the story fails the robots themselves, the effects team didn't slack.
Dark of the moon (2011): The three day watch.
This film took me three days to finish. Not because it's long, though it is, but because my brain kept tapping out halfway through.
Megan Fox is gone here, and the reason behind it is more interesting than anything in the actual movie. In a 2009 interview with Wonderland magazine, she compared Bay to Hitler, saying he wanted that kind of reputation on set and calling him a nightmare to work for. Bay later told GQ that it was actually Spielberg, the franchise's executive producer, who told him to fire her over those comments. Spielberg has since denied that this happened at all. Fox's side always maintained she chose to leave on her own. Either way, she was out, and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley stepped in to play the love interest this time around.
I'll be honest, the new girl can't act well. She's not given much to work with either, but even accounting for that, she doesn't bring the same grounding presence LaBeouf had paired with Fox in the first film.
The story itself is actually a step up from Revenge of the Fallen. There's a clearer through line involving a hidden Cybertronian ship on the moon, and the stakes feel more coherent. But the action sequences ask you to turn your brain off completely. These humans survive damage that should kill anyone several times over, falling buildings, explosions at point blank range, vehicles flipping through debris, and they just walk it off. At some point I genuinely started laughing at the movie.
The film made over 1.1 billion dollars worldwide, making it the highest grossing entry in the entire series. The CGI, as always with this franchise, holds up. Smooth, detailed, impressive in motion.
Plot: 5.9. CGI: 8.8.
Age of extinction (2014): New cast, same problems.
Total reset on the human side. New lead, new daughter, new businessman villain figure. None of the original human cast returns for this one, fresh start across the board.
Mark Wahlberg doesn't work for me here. He's trying a little too hard to be the cool, capable lead, and it just doesn't click. He feels like he's performing confidence rather than actually carrying it.
Then there's the storyline with his daughter Tessa and her secret boyfriend Shane. When Wahlberg's character finds out about the relationship and threatens to call the police, Shane pulls out an actual citation, claiming the relationship is protected under what the film calls a Romeo and Juliet law, since Tessa was 17 when it started and he was barely over the line himself. It's framed as a joke between him and the dad but I found it deeply uncomfortable, and the actor for Shane, Jack Reynor, later told the Hollywood Reporter that looking back, especially in the years since the Me Too movement gained ground, it's definitely a problematic joke, even though he wasn't the one who wrote it. That's not me being overly sensitive, that's the actor himself looking back and going "Yeah, that wasn't great."
By this point in the marathon I had fully stopped trying to find logic in the bigger plot too. Why is there suddenly a tech company building its own Transformers from scratch. Why are the Dinobots a thing now, dinosaur robots locked away by a bounty hunter from space. None of it connects to anything that came before in any satisfying way, it just exists because the franchise needed something new to sell.
That said, the story does feel more deliberate than Dark of the Moon, even if it's introducing concepts with no real foundation. This one also crossed 1.1 billion dollars worldwide, so clearly none of my complaints mattered to the box office.
Plot: 6.4. CGI: 9, still rock solid.
The last knight (2017): Whatever this was.
By this film, it felt like the team just did whatever they wanted with no real plan to tie it together. We've got King Arthur, Merlin, ancient Transformer knights, and a Cybertronian goddess who brainwashes Optimus Prime into an actual villain. There's also a historian character who apparently knows the secret history connecting all of it.
I'm typing this and I'm already struggling to remember the actual plot mechanics, and I watched it days ago. That tells you something. I was just relieved when it ended.
The CGI though, is excellent here. Whatever else this film gets wrong, the visual craft on the robots themselves is some of the best in the series. The final battle, unfortunately, is exactly where my biggest complaint about the whole franchise comes into full focus, I'll get into that soon.
This was also the point where the box office finally cracked. The film opened to a franchise low domestic debut and finished around 600 million dollars worldwide, well below Age of Extinction's billion dollar haul. A sign that audiences were getting tired of the formula.
Plot: 5.8. CGI: 8.9.
The action problem nobody talks about enough.
Here's my real issue across all five films, and it's not really about plot. Michael Bay's editing style, his lighting choices, and the overcomplicated robot designs combine to make the action hard to follow. The robots have so many moving panels and overlapping metal pieces that during a fight, you can lose track of which limb belongs to which character. Add in Bay's fast cuts and his preference for tight, chaotic framing during big battles, and a lot of these sequences become a blur of metal and sparks rather than something you can actually track beat by beat. It's less about whether you can technically see the screen and more about whether your brain can process what's happening on it fast enough.
The first film handles this slightly better just because the pacing gives you more room to register what's going on. The sequels speed everything up and throw more robots into frame at once, and that clarity gets harder to hold onto.
Overall: Did this finally make me a Transformers person.
Short answer, no. Not the way the MonsterVerse movies did, not the way Attack on Titan did. These films did their job as blockbuster entertainment, and I don't regret the marathon, but I never reached that point of being fully invested.
Part of it is scale. I like Optimus Prime, I like Bumblebee, there's a real charm to these robots across the series. But size wise, they just don't hit the level I want from giant robot media. I'm talking Pacific Rim kaiju scale, Attack on Titan colossal titan scale. Transformers robots don't feel big in a "this thing could swallow a city block" way, and that difference matters more to my enjoyment than I expected going in.
Still, not a bad watch overall. The first film earns its reputation. The rest range from fine to forgettable, with Revenge of the Fallen being the clear low point for reasons that go beyond just plot quality.
What about you, have you sat through all five of these, and did any of them actually convert you into a fan?
Or did you also stop at one and never look back. Drop your verdict in the comments.
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