WOW!
Very glad I saw it on the big screen. Big with the action. It was the first film I've seen where people spontaneouesly cheered at several points throughout the film (main title, Optimus Prime's first sighting in truck mode, and Megatron's ass-kicking first line "I...am Megatron!")
THE GOOD:
[-] Heavy on the robo-action. Thank fuck.
[-] Heavy on the feeling, depsite the slight cheesiness of the writing. For example, when one of the Autobots (won't say who) is killed (and when I say killed, I mean grabbed by arms and legs and ripped in fucking half.) my jaw dropped and I gasped loudly exactly as I did when I was 5, seeing Brawn shot by Megatron in the first TF movie. I turned to Adrian and saw the exact same look on his face. Whoa.
[-] "One shall stand, one shall fall." GOOSEBUMPS.
[-] Frenzy! Despite his slightly alien look and wierd, Ewok-like speech, the little bugger kicked a ridiculous amount of ass and had the highest bodycount of all the Decepticons bar Megatron. Oh, and for those of you who aren't Adrian or me, here's the difference:
Old Frenzy
[-] Bumblebee as Camero worked surprisingly well. I didn't miss the Vee-Dub at all.
[-] "It seems you have failed me again, Starscream." Bwa ha ha ha.
[-] Geeking out with Craig and Adrian afterwards.
[-] Lots of other stuff too.
THE BAD
[-] The amount of moving parts of the robot forms (most of which were steel grey), made it hard to distinguish an detail when two of the robots were fighting. They're just a smush of blurred motion.
[-] The pigeon-holing of African-American-street-culture-through-the-filter-of-white-suburban-writers grated on me. For example, instead of Jazz using outdated, near-beatnik phrasing as he did in the show, he talked like Fifty-Cent. Despite it being a funny scene, I could have lived the rest of my life without have heard Optimus Prime say "My bad."
[-] So much military stock footage. It seemed the first half of the movie was tanks, planes and jeeps driving and flying around.
[-] Decepticons, for the most part, looked great, but went down like pussies in three seconds. Except Starscream. Who disappeared for 20-minute stretches, then showed up, then disappeared again.
Oh, and the Simpsons trailer. Gotta see that. Go Spider-Pig!