Some actor who was in the Transformers movies, on why he was disappointed with Transformers 2, “You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”
The way you have relationships and robot fights at the same time? Let the robots be actual characters. As soon as they made a movie centred on this LaBeouf character, the war was lost, because the movie was called Transformers and he was not a transformer. So instead of the transformers having their own personal conflicts, they spend all of their screen time going, “Oh, LaBeouf, you are so special and wonderful, and you will help us save the world, and we’ll get you a girlfriend who isn’t a transformer, who will pull down the pants of that guy who works for the government and also isn’t a transformer. And there will also be some soldiers and a couple of hackers, all of whom are not transformers.”
I’m going to propose something similar to the Bechdel/Wallace test. Count the scenes where there are
1) at least two transformers
2) that talk to each other
3) about something other than LaBeouf
I’ll call it the Hill Test.
And then when there’s giant robots fighting, you’ll know whose ass it is, and why it’s farting who the giant robots are, and why they’re fighting.