One of my all time favorite movies, not only because I'm a fan of Transformers toys, but also coz it's a pretty good action pic. The beginning was perfect, with Blackout storming a military base. It leaves a huge impact to the viewer and sets up the tone for the rest of the movie nicely. It's still one of the most unforgettable scenes in the Transformers trilogy of movies. While the plot is simple, it doesn't do too bad a job and your interest in what's going to happen next never diminishes. Sure, there were a few areas where the film dragged on for a bit. Especially in scenes where you don't know why they've added it, well okay, they added it for humor's sake, but it was poorly done and didn't mesh well. Either that, or they were lame to begin with. Some streamlining of the scenes would have made the film flow better and faster paced. You either love or hate the designs, I would have preferred it if the robot designs were comprised of so many pieces, such that when they transform, it just looks like they explode into shards and collapse back into a robot, a far cry from the class manipulation of bigger parts of the cartoons.
A more noticeable flaw here with the designs is that when you have a few robots onscreen at the same time, brawling or punching each other, you can be hard pressed to distinguish what's happening and who's who amongst the mess of parts. The massive amount of small parts in the designs doesn't give the robots a solid outline in these fast moving scenes. Sam and Bumblebee are likable main characters, although they are way too many side characters to keep track of. Cut the data analyst group and it'll be easier to swallow. The dramatic and grand sounding music led itself to the scenes very well, invoking the emotions of the scenes. The climax of the film was great. This final fight of the Autobots against Decepticons was intense, and you could finally see the Transformers in an all out battle. Megatron's lines were cool, although you do wish that the other Decepticons got some more speaking parts. The ending was good while the death of one of the Autobots led some credibility that this was war, and not everyone will survive. The movie that boosted the popularity of the Transformers brand, it's the best out of the trilogy by far.