The only thing I remember from the original Transformers movie — circa 1986 — was that Optimus Prime died — and this I only remember because of something some said about it years later — with that sense of false nostalgia I used to play with — “I cried when Optimus Prime died.  My Grandma took me to see it.  She fell asleep in the middle.”
That does strike me as a type of torture — family duty though it may be.  I trust Grandma took him to the park after to shake off her lingering debris from the experience.
I believe Optimus Prime was immediately resurrected in a series of cartoons which aired as much to wrap up the movie’s loose ends as to put in the mind of boys to get their parents to buy the Optimus Prime toy for Christmas.

The movie was based on a cartoon produced to sell a line of toys.  The storyline had to be put in place so boys in the single digit age range would know what the plot line was when smashing their gadget toys against each other.
Two decades later, Michael Bay produced a new trilogy of live action Transformers movies.  Roger Ebert, a movie critic in the populist vein who both believes that the general public can enjoy and appreciate high brow cinema and that there is room for low brow junk well crafted — tried to give the thing a pass but then threw up his hands in the air and declared defeat.

The best review I saw and heard of the first one of these was Rick Emerson’s notebook observations.  From what I have seen of the thing, it looks rather irredeemable.  There is no bother to make the storyline coherent, and Bay undercuts anything on that score by winking and nodding on through what the audience came to see — the big bloated action sequences.  The CGI looks bad, and through the last decade it has generally been clear we had not reached a point with this technology where we should be to make these things credible.  As it is the contrast is dizzying — it is shiny on shiny where there was a visual reason for the old black and white Westerns to have the “White Hats” against the “Black Hats”.

The best review I saw of the second one of these was from Ta Nehisi Coates’s blog at The Atlantic.  “That movie was fun, but god was it racist”.  It was observed in many sources that we had found our way to some “jive talking” Transformer robot characters.  And naturally, the spectacle was amped up to another degree, with .

It seems that the last installment is a “minor breakthrough” in CGI — no small feat and either nothing special or the whole difference — but reportedly the heart of the movie — a bunch of explosions — has some clarity to it.  I get mixed reports on the nature of the storyline — Yes, you have all this — does this thing give a damned in that sphere of “In a World where–” to have a world where all that makes any type of sense?  And apparently the Racist act has been dropped.

And the movie is, apparently, two things against it in devolution.  It’s apparently more sexist.  It may seem absurd to contemplate character and motive to the previous sexy love interest, what with the scene that the audience remembers is of Megan Fox bending over to fix a car, but if you throw out her personality — “Biker Chick” — you do see easily her place in fighting against automotive robot toys.  She was, reportedly, hard on the set and as such was replaced in the script with a Victoria’s Secret Underwear model whose personality is nurturing to the bitter lead male, and falls into the “captive” role.  A fuller and revealing story “on the set” is found in this LA Times story — our new actress knows how to “arch her back” right, as “Rosie comes with this Victoria’s Secret background, and she’s comfortable with it, so she can get down with Mike’s way of working and it makes the whole set vibe very different.”  Read into that for the character’s place in the movie whatever you may.  It is a difference between a 1 and a 1 and a half dimensional character within the backdrop of story-lines that move within that same range.

The other observation from this review — Bay’s adolescent id — is the exploding bloodiness of the scenes — or, our blood substitute of grease and grime and oil.  This is the nature of these movie sequels — the audience expectations are for the next installment to have “MORE!!!”, and I gather even Bay knows the limits to that game, and knows enough to check out before having to embark on a 90 minute sequence where the Transformers are now actually shedding something that looks even more remarkably like blood.  We see this too in the reported crass-ness of Optimus Prime — who, if I recall, and is an uncrass character who should be, absurdly and stoicly perhaps, making noble statements of grandeur.  His crassness is that last line to cross for this thing.

It is probably a case of the difference between indulging a child’s instinct and an adolescent’s instincts, but my guess in all of this is that for any adult sensibilities , the initial cartoon movie is the least insulting.  And there your inner adult has simply fallen asleep.

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