That thing you’re smelling is more Transformers movie cheese.

Okay, so it’s been a little while since I’ve tilted at the Transformers windmill, my lone voice of cinematic reason falling with a painful, hollow “thud” upon the hardwood floor of popular opinion, but believe me when I tell you that it’s some kind of Herculean challenge to keep sensibly quiet when the Transformers news that we see on a near-constant basis is just filled with so much…cheese.

I’m convinced that I have become the Miles Bennell of next year’s Transformers movie. I am the only one who truly understands how crapheadedly wrong the very concept, the very idea - the very fiber of this movie is.

So I alone must be the one chosen to tell you about it.

First stop on the Transformers Cheese Tour today is the ongoing contest hosted by the movie’s official Web site to cast votes for a line of dialogue to be intoned by the movie’s star Autobot Optimus Prime. Forgetting for the moment that this “viral” tactic was last used by an Internet Sensation Movie Event That Wasn’t, we can also choose to head over to the official Transformers The Movie DVD soundboard, (from the animated 1986 movie) where we are treated to delightful little audio bon-bons of classic lines spoken by our favorite war-waging robots in disguise.

Okay, Geekformers, take a crack at my new contest after the jump. See if you can spot the fake line of cheesy dialogue from this selection of actual Transformers lines and fan-submitted Transformers lines:

Here are your cheesy choices:

1. Perhaps our war will shine the way so humanity may finally accept the notion of peace.
2. Get the dinobots into the shuttle!
3. My strength lay not in my metal body, my fellow Autobots, but in the mettle of my soul.
4. Megatron thinks he is above the law - but he isn’t above mine.
5. Feed him to the sharkicons.

Seriously: what in the hell is this? Are the robots in Transformers really going to talk like this, in moronic, heavy-handed, Roddenberry-meets-bad-action-movie-speak?

(BTW, if you really can’t spot the fake line, leave me a comment below and I’ll clue you in)

Transformers Cheese Update #2: There was news recently that singer/songwriter Stan Bush is creating a song to be placed on the Transformers soundtrack. If you haven’t heard of Stan Bush, it’s probably because you’re not crazy about music stuck in the classic, Survivor/Triumph/Whitesnake-without-the-relevance sound of mid-80s children’s action cartoons. In fact, it sounds and looks a lot like this. One has to wonder how serious Michael Bay could be about including Bush’s retro music on his movie’s soundtrack; after all, just what could these two men have in common, anyway….?

Transformers Cheesy Update #3: Folks were very excited recently upon seeing pictures of “movie actor” Shia LaBeouf holding/running with/pretending-like-he’s-running-with an Energon Cube. Hopefully this indicates that the movie will have a LOT of Baytastic Action Setpieces that are propelled by the likes of “Get that Energon Cube!” and “We’re going to get that Energon Cube back” and “Yeah, but they don’t realize - we’ve got the Energon Cube” and, naturally, “ENNNNERRRRGOOONN!”

Really, has film history ever seen something this foolish created outside of the Star Wars universe? I mean sure, SW gave us such idiocies as “Qui Gon” and “Sebulba” and “Count Dooku” - but those at least sought to resemble alien names and words! If the robots in Transformers are from another planet, why are their names all created with Latin and English roots and suffixes? Words like “energon” and “autobot” and “megatron” and “optimus” - aren’t these all essentially “human earthling”-type words? But just more…cheesy?

Here’s the thing: when Hollywood takes some kind of would-be cinematic property - usually one that once had retro appeal to children who have grown into a desirable demographic - and then updates it for the movies and expands it into feature length, it doesn’t work. Are there exceptions? Sure there are, and occasionally they manage to squeak out bits and pieces of quality and sometimes success - but by and large these efforts end up as The Grinch or Bewitched or Garfield or Aeon Flux or The Dukes of Hazzard or The Flintstones or Lost In Space or Fat Albert or frigging Wild Wild West.

And this will also be the fate of Transformers: a whole lot of hype, a very loud movie crafted with dizzy, seizure-inducing camera work and editing, and the wholesale lowering of our quality standards for originality, innovation, clever storytelling and filmmaking that inspires the soul. Instead, all we’ll be left with is the lingering, acrid smell of having been willfully bilked of our precious moviegoing dollars.

That, movie fans, is the smell of bad movie cheese.