4. A Child-Friendly Tone
Paramount PicturesThe original appeal of Michael Bay's Transformers franchise was that it might return us to the gleeful, nostalgic joy of being a little kid and watching the Transformers cartoon for the first time, before playing with the toys and so on. Those dreams were crushed pretty early on when Bay began to suffuse the series with humour aimed at adolescent boys, referencing masturbation and other sexual activity, drugs, and unnecessary swearing. This makes us sound like wimps, sure, but to us, Transformers was never something to be perverted and given a more adult spin: what's wrong with including the explosions and awesome battles just as they are, but holding back on the lingering shots at a girl's a** and everything else that makes the Transformers movies feel like a Michael Bay movie more than a faithful adaptation of the source material. We enjoy ogling the female form and watching some bada** swear his head off while taking on the bad guys as much as anyone else, but it has to be in the right context, and in the realm of Transformers, it feels excessive and totally needless. This property is better than that.