Transformers

A dorky teenager (Shia LaBeouf) buys an aging Chevy Camaro that can change into a powerful robot—and what’s more, it’s a soldier in one of two armies of robots (one good, one evil) waging a galaxy-spanning war. Director Michael Bay’s movie aims to cash in on the Japanese toys marketed in the United States by Hasbro since 1984 (with kids’ TV cartoons and video games to provide a backstory for the robot war). With 1980s children now grown into nostalgic adults, the movie probably didn’t have to be very good, and it’s not; Bay deploys his usual Demolition Derby style with relish, and with his usual disregard for dramatic sense. He and his writers (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and John Rogers) gamble that no boy-at-heart will care about the cavernous holes in the script, and they’re probably right.