Soon I'll upload individual reviews for the first three Transformers movies and continue my Revenge of the Fallen Rewritten series. In the meantime, I've decided to take an overall look at Bay's failures when making the Transformers franchise and particular ways he could have improved. The modern Transformers movies are infamous for their lack of character development, overreliance on explosions and eye candy, and essentially being elongated advertisements for the US Military.
But it could have been better. It still could have included action packed scenes, but not just eye-pleasing ones, ones that were emotionally driven by character arcs rather then explosions and special effects. Sadly, Bay was driven by greed, and thus didn't care of the memorable movies he COULD have done, but the contemporary sci fi alien flicks he DID do.
Transformers's Comic and Cartoon versions always emphasised the relationships the Autobots and even the Decepticons had with each other. That may seem silly considering they're giant robot warriors, but it made them special and not just another franchise to sell action figures and toys.
When Michael Bay approached the franchise he didn't see opportunity for growth or development, he saw a means to sell toys like many other of the directors or producers Hasbro hired did. This mentality destroys any hope of the movie being truly enjoyable. But the movies could have been interesting. Bay's worst mistake was not taking advantage of the timeless characters he had at his disposal such as Starscream or Soundwave. The Autobots have very little character arcs, all of the screentime is handed to Sam Witwicky, the human protagonist.
And that's the problem, in a movie with giant robots fighting, we don't want to see humans.