Ranking Transformers Movies

After ranking Marvel movies and Star Wars movies, let's rank Transformers movies...because they're like the 3rd highest grossing franchise in the last 15 years...maybe.  Or not.  But definitely in the top 10.

7.  Revenge of the Fallen:  When I saw this in the theater, an old lady's exasperated comment summed it up perfectly:  "This movie is so stupid!"  Yes, yes it was.  Even most of the robots looked stupid because almost all of the new ones had wheels for feet for some reason.  They made Jetfire (my favorite) a creaky old geezer who died.  Devastator, the first Combiner, was some kind of weird giant robot cat thing.  And a human Transformer?  WTF?  That's a Terminator, not a Transformer.  Oh, and Optimus does not kill and quip; he's not someone who enjoys killing.  Like The Last Jedi, this seemed determined to troll longtime fans on just about everything.

6.  The Last Knight:  If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what the hell this movie was about.  Optimus was evil because Cybertron wanted to eat Earth...or something.  And Transformers were in WWII?  And back in medieval times?  A three-headed transforming dragon thing?  A weird little scooter transformer?  Baby Dinobots?  What the fuck is going on here?

5.  Age of Extinction:  Again, it'd be hard for me to describe the plot of this.  Marky Mark Wahlberg is some kind of inventor who finds a truck in an old movie theater that turns out to be Optimus Prime, who's all broken up even though all he had to do was scan another vehicle to fix himself.  Meanwhile there's some kind of plot to make Transformers that goes awry.  And some dude called Lockdown hunting other Transformers.  It was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  The hapless new Autobots were kind of funny but Drift was way less cool (and more racist) than the original IDW comics version, Hound was not as cool as the original TV one, and Crosshairs was nothing like the original Crosshairs.  And the Dinobots don't talk?  No "Me, Grimlock, kick butt!"?  What happened to fan service, goddamnit!?

4.  Dark of the Moon:  The coolest thing about this was it used a plot from the original cartoon series wherein the Autobots are railroaded into leaving Earth, allowing the Decepticons to have free rein.  Of course it's done much, much worse than a 1985 two-part cartoon.  But it was also neat to have Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime since he voiced Galvatron in the original movie.  But Shockwave as a giant worm?  Lame.

3.  Bumblebee:  A Force Awakens-type movie as it largely follows the formula of the 2007 movie of a boy girl and his her robot car.  It simplifies the plot a lot more than the 4 previous movies on this list.  The robot designs also looked a lot better, with most of the existing characters on Cybertron actually looking like their G1 versions.  The new characters looked pretty good too.  I was disappointed that I couldn't find a toy version of the one that turned into a Harrier jump jet and another that turned into an F4 Phantom fighter plane.  The former they only seem to make in car mode and I don't know about the other.  The thing I didn't like about most of this movie were the almost constant music cues reminding us it was the 80s.  I mean, really, I got it the first time; I don't need you to drum it into my head 100 more times!

2.  Transformers (2007):  The OG live action version!  The junky robot designs aren't great and once it gets past the boy and his car part, it really starts getting muddled--a peek at the future of the franchise.  More than most of the sequels it tried somewhat to give the robots personalities, not just ethnic stereotypes, but Optimus and Bumblebee were the only ones that stuck.  It's a low bar, but it's easily the best of the Michael Bay movies.

1.  Transformers:  The Movie:  The OG Transformers movie!  It has a lot of flaws, like killing off pretty much everyone from the first two seasons of the cartoon--or at least the first season since most second season characters didn't even show up--but the death of Optimus Prime only showed how important he was to the Transformers mythos.  It did introduce some fun new characters:  Hot Rod, Kup, Arcee, Springer, and Ultra Magnus who all remain a part of Transformers toy lines to this day.  And I mentioned before somewhere that this was one of the first animated movies to use a lot of well-known actors in its cast like Orson Welles, Judd Nelson, Robert Stack, Eric Idle, and Leonard Nimoy.  And as 80s as the soundtrack is, I can't not hear "The Touch" or "Dare" and think of the scenes from the movie they were featured in.  So mostly for sentimental reasons this is still the top of my list.  You don't like it, get your own list!

And there you go.  More stuff ranked.