Though the original “Transformers” cartoon had little to no human characters, Spielberg and writers Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci believed the core of the film should be a boy and his car, with movies like “E.T.” providing inspiration to Kurtzman “for the way that Elliott became the audience and how we were experiencing the wonder and the magic of E.T. coming to earth.” This makes sense when looked through an Amblin tone, but Michael Bay wanted more; he wasn’t interested in a toy movie for kids.
In Bay’s own words, he didn’t just want to make a nostalgia play aimed at people who wanted to see toys on screen, he wanted to make the movie “really real and edgy.” His answer was the whole subplot about the military. “I knew I wanted to make it very credible and serious, and I told these guys I wanted to broaden it out and make it so that it had a little more global impact.” In the movie, we constantly cut between the story of Sam Witwicky (member of the ancient Order of the Witwiccans, a secret organization of people that collaborated with transformers to change human history, which also included Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Darwin and Catherine the Great) and the story of a group of soldiers stranded in the Middle East who join the fight against the Decepticons, which is where the grittier, more violent aspects of the movie come in.
Does that plot help the film significantly? That is debatable, but there is no mistake that Michael Bay did manage to make this film his own, and managed to leave no doubt that this was not a toy movie for the Amblin crowd.