I think my average rating for the majority of the "Tranformers" series has been about a 2 out of 5. In my view it's a series that squandered a lot of potential.
I liked the first film in 2007. For 2007, the special effects were really impressive, and everything came together pretty nicely. Bay's brand of humor was there but it seemed to be kept in check and some of it worked. Plus, having Sam as a character to be the human element to introduce audiences to the Autobots was solid and all together his coming of age story was a good framework for the rest of what was going on.
Plus, the first movie featured Transformers that were actually memorable, Jazz, Iron Hide, ect.
The second movie, Revenge of the Fallen, is where I knew that there were problems. Bumblebee still couldn't talk. Why? It's never explained. There was also a ton more lame humor, such as the dog humping things, the pot brownies with the mom, John Turturro wearing a jock strap, that little robot spouting off nonsense, the two annoying robots, and one of the robots having clanging testicles.
On top of that, the movie seemed to, for whatever reason, want to keep focusing on Shia LaBeouf instead of the actual Transformers. Having Sam as a key character in the first film made sense since he was there to introduce us to the bots. Here, the movie should have been about them, yet we barely spend any time with the cool robots. All we do is spend time with Sam, his girlfriend, his annoying college friend and John Turturro's character. Arcee, for example, appears in the movie (as a motorcycle for some reason) and we don't even get to learn about her at all.
Maybe this movie could have worked if, after high school, Sam had joined the military and was the rookie in the Transformers task force.
Then, in the next movie, Dark of the Moon, we have to follow Sam and his stupid drama AGAIN. I'm sorry, but I don't care about him trying to find a job. And him telling people that HE saved the world when he did like 5 percent of the work at most, what a joke.
On top of that, more of the bad humor, such as having Ken Jeong play his character from The Hangover and yell deep wang a bunch of times, because you know, wang means kitten and that's funny. Not.
Then, in the next movie, they finally decided to get rid of Sam, but it wasn't much of an improvement.
The movie introduces an inventor played by Mark Wahlberg. Now, I happen to like Wahlberg, but I never really bought him as an inventor and his performance doesn't sell that, either. Wahlberg's character was a heck of a lot better than the supporting cast, though, lame comic relief Lucas, his dumb daughter and her disrespectful douche of a boyfriend. At least Lucas got killed.
I think there was a major missed opportunity to have Wahlberg's character actually be pretty smart but just overlooked. That way he could build the Transformers maybe some new gear or make improvements that they hadn't thought of. Instead Wahlberg just shoots a sword that happens to be a gun and drinks Bud Light.
Oh, and also, there was NO reason for this to be 2 hours and 45 minutes!
Aside from all those individual issues I have with those movies, I think there was a major problem with the movies overall. And that is, they aren't building to anything. All of the movies feel entirely self contained, there's a human protagonist down on his luck, the Autobots have a tense relationship with the government but need to spring into action to stop the Decepticons and there's usually a world ending threat. It's fair enough for a formula, but it doesn't BUILD on top of the next. Part II could have been a cliff hanger maybe, or at the very least have a threat looming that still needs to be taken care of.
It's something that the Marvel series, on the other hand, has been doing to a lot of success.
So, that brings us to this trailer. There appears to be another world ending threat (I'm guessing Unicron) and more human drama and more Optimus and the autobots being uneasy. I just can't get hyped for it.