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Every week was just another in a series of increasingly less plausible contrivances for these characters to fight frustratingly inconclusive battles with each other. Narratively, this eventually became as much fun as watching someone you love burn in hell. Economically, it was a convenient excuse for constant character churn, which meant new toys. Personally, I got so tired of watching shows about nothing try to sell me toys that DID nothing, at some point I just went outside to ride my bike, and never came back.

Bye, Mattel. Go screw yourself, Hasbro.

Now, we live in a world where a surprising number of kids don’t even KNOW how to ride a bike. And where I was appalled by the clearly vapid nature of Transformers, the TV show, somewhere another child couldn’t get enough of it. For him, this would be the pinnacle of storytelling and imagination. He would vow to grow up and become a powerful Hollywood executive, helping to pioneer the art of the two-hour toy commercial. Decades later, he would instinctively reach for the phone to call Michael Bay - and the Death of Film could truly begin.

So imagine that there are two competing races of alien robots that, for some reason, are shaped like people. One is good and one is evil, although the only way to really tell them apart is that one side doesn’t care who they kill and the other one kind of does. Also, Autobots kind of “look” good, and Decepticons kind of “look” evil, and for some reason have chosen to name themselves after an ominous sounding word (remember, we are talking about the kind of logic the sixth grade me already rejected). The other important thing to remember about Autobots and Decepticons is that they fight over shapes.

In every Transformers film I can recall seeing, beginning with this one, the giant robots are in search of a “thingy” that kind of looks like a cube, and it does robot stuff, and if the Autobots get their hands in it then hooray, and if the Decepticons get their hands on it, them they will use it to blow up the planet, or something. It really doesn’t matter, because the Thingy has traveled the vast reaches of space to crash on Earth, and of course the one person with the key to finding the Thingy is a fast talking, socially awkward teen named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), neither of whom look young enough to be in high school.

Naturally, this involves Sam and Mikaela joining the Autobots and their noble leader, Optimus Prime (voiced, as in the 1980s, by Peter Cullen). You may wonder exactly what it is about Sam that makes him the Key to the Thingy the robots are looking for, but explaining it would only prove why it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that most of the film involves a globetrotting Race for the Thingy between Team Autobot and Team Decepticon, who are led by the villainous (looking) Megatron (Hugo Weaving). Whoever finds the little metal square first, wins.

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