First movie was great, the rest
The first was great, because executive producer Steven Spielberg was more hands on with the guiding Michael Bay through the movie. He had a simple premise for the movie, " A movie about a boy and his special car." Then Transformers made a lot of money and Steven had a lot of projects to attend to, so he said, "Take it away, Michael.
" and Bay completely lost his mind.
I loved the teaser trailer for the first Transformers movie where we learned that we sent a satellite to Mars and a huge organic form (Starscream) attacked and obliterated it.
Everyone who knew of Transformers such as myself cheered when they saw the trailer and everyone who knew nothing was intrigued by it. They also had a brilliant viral marketing campaign with the Sector Seven website which if you fished around could find some interesting videos of Grimlock, Laserbeak, Reflector, G1 Bumblebee and G1 Starscream.
For the record, I also enjoyed Dark of the Moon and Bumblebee, but the rest of the franchise is
.