So I went along to see this tonight with my brother - I wasn't sure if it would be any good or not, but felt oddly obligated to go, considering everything Transformers has added to my life over the years.

It was......okay. Seeing the old animation in 4:3 format on a cinema screen works about as well as you'd think, but with some slightly distracting animated 'Teletran 1' filler on the side kind of like the old G2 cartoon rerelease. I think the biggest disappointment was that they only did the table read for the first episode. I knew that going in but even so, it would have been great if they could have kept it going for the whole of the first 3 episodes - because it was good fun, and really impressive to hear how well some of these guys can still perform. Peter Cullen is getting a little too old, but Frank Welker and Dan Gilvezan were immaculate.

While the replacement voices were understandable, I'm not sure if there's a story behind Corey Burton being absent - given what a prolific voice actor he has been over the years it was a shame to not see him.

So after that first episode it was just a little....meh. And it was particularly weird that they chose to go the first 4 episodes, and not just stop after 3 - it was like they felt the runtime needed to be a certain length to be a good value proposition. Strangely, the visual and audio cleanup on Episode 4 was also noticeably worse than the first 3. The end of it was particularly jarring too - after the last epsiode, they jumped to one of the public safety announcements (Bumblebee saying 'don't run away from home, kids!') and then a quick screen of 'in memoriam' with the deceased voice actors listed, and then....over, lights on, get out of the cinema.

If they'd done the table read for the first 3 episodes, with a little more time interviewing these old legends, then it would be a must-see for diehard fans. But as it is, the whole thing felt really low effort and I find it hard to recommend to anyone on the fence about going.