What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that, essentially, this is a commercial tie-in with a line of Hasbro action-figure toys. While this has a certain cult following (what bad movie doesn't?), it's a confusing, jumbled, and chaotic viewing experience for anyone who couldn't tell the Dinobots from the Insecticons. It also forms more or less the last episode of the original Transformers TV series, so if you feel like you've walked in late and missed something, that's why.

Families can talk about the idea of making movies or cartoons as platforms for peddling playthings. Worthy films like Star Wars and Toy Story have shamelessly marketed toys based on themselves, and there were toys inspired by likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse long ago. What do you think about movies, TV shows, and video games based solely on toys? Can you think of any other plaything-oriented movies that were better/worse than this one? How much more expensive is the movie after you buy the ticket and the merchandise? If you like the toys, do you think you'd like them as much if another movie wasn't coming out?

Common Sense Media Review
If TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE teaches us anything, it's that in all the cleverly conceived, gimmicky buy-them-all robots Hasbro foisted on toy shelves, one was sorely forgotten: Script-itron.

Essentially a wrap-up to the TV show, Transformers: The Movie is set in the "future" year 2005. There's been an ongoing war between alien robot races, the good Autobots, and their friends the Dinobots against evil Decepticons -- never mind that, except for the Dinobots, when these things are unfolded it's pretty difficult to tell one Transformer from another. When their planet fell to the Decepticons, the Autobots were able to befriend humans and set up a base on Earth.

Here the Decepticon warlord Megatron launches a sneak attack on Earth's Autobot city that winds up killing the show's longstanding hero Autobot, Optimus Prime. Before dying, he passes on to his successor a glittery doo-dad called the Matrix that's supposed to be really important. Meanwhile, a new menace comes along, a robot called Unicron who, like the Death Star, is a planet-sized machine that destroys and eats other planets. The only thing posing a threat to Unicron is the Matrix, so the monstrous robot gives the damaged Megatron an upgrade to capture it.

A confusing, jumbled, and chaotic narrative moves through chases and fights with barely any breathing space and introduces so many weird characters and things (sharkitrons, insecticons) that only a kid who owns all the toy tie-ins could tell them apart (which was probably the idea). The soundtrack is obnoxiously nonstop '80s rock music (sounding much like imitation Van Halen fanfares), with a cameo by "Weird Al" Yankovic's Devo parody "Dare to Be Stupid" dropped in for a scene where the Transformers battle on a planet called Junk. Little touches like those indicate that nobody was taking this movie seriously.

Animation, done by the Japanese (who were into this giant-robot fantasy long ago) is TV-grade, with a vocal cast being a curious mixture of prolific cartoon-voiceover specialists and time-proven Hollywood character actors, who attempt to imbue individual Transformers with stereotypical personalities that the impersonal drawings don't convey; there's an old-timer, a young whippersnapper, a mighty lunkhead, and one robot who does everything fast -- mainly to give a role to John Moschitta, an actor in TV ads from the '80s renowned for talking really fast. Most notoriously, Orson Welles logged his final screen credit as the unenthused, whispered voice of Unicron.

Megatron, meanwhile, is Leonard Nimoy, who had a much better role in an earlier film about a planet-devastating machine-creature, Star Trek: The Motion Picture . Sure there have been galaxies of toy tie-ins with that franchise, but with real scripts behind them, maybe they earned the right.

Better toy stories include Toy Story and its sequel --what else? A better Transformers outing is the TV show spinoff Transformers: Cybertron .

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