On the one hand, you've got a military intrigue film about the U.S. Army facing an unknown enemy threat that has the Pentagon stumped enough to call in outside help from young analysts and hackers, while a small band of soldiers are on the run for their lives.
And on the other hand, you've got a whimsical coming-of-age film about a boy getting his first car in hopes of impressing the girl he has a crush on, and his car turns out to actually be an extraordinary being from outer space, who helps the boy get the girl and takes them both on a life-changing, whirlwind adventure.
...And somewhere in there, you've got a Transformers film with Autobots and Decepticons coming to Earth from Planet Cybertron and fighting each other over the AllSpark. This was used as the glue that helped tie those other two films together, but still really feels like Bay wanted to make the military intrigue film while Spielberg wanted him to make the coming-of-age film instead. Thus, the end result feels like a mashed-together compromise.
Consequently, because the film needed to hurriedly bring everyone together in its final act, some parts of this mashed-together compromise feel really underdeveloped. The hacker subplot with Maggie and Glen gets hastily interrupted and halted by having the two of them arrested and locked in an interrogation room for nearly the entirety of the film's second act, all to give more room to the other ongoing plot threads and to introduce yet another one whose inclusion felt really unfinished: Sector Seven. They just show up out of nowhere halfway through the movie to interrupt it for a while, only getting things back on track when they're suddenly used to bring all of the separate casts of characters together at Hoover Dam.
The introductory scene for them with the vans pulling up to Sam's house and Simmons going, "We're the government! Sector Seven!" just felt really rushed and forced in out of nowhere. This is why I feel they should have used the hacker subplot to better set up Sector Seven: In the earlier scene when Maggie and Glen go "Project: Iceman?" "What's Sector Seven?", they are almost immediately interrupted by a mysterious SWAT team arresting them. In the scene as is, we're just supposed to believe that they're the police or agents of the Pentagon arresting them merely because Maggie was found out for sneaking top secret information out into public.
But this arrest scene could have had one more shot of Maggie and Glen in handcuffs being dragged out of the house by the SWAT team with two mysterious men in suits and dark glasses silently observing and overseeing the situation, letting the audience silently and visually tell that these two are the ones charge of this arrest. And since we wouldn't have seen these two men before, we'd be left wondering just who they and their SWAT team are if they're not the police or the Pentagon. Said two men would be Simmons and Banachek, giving us our first glimpse at Sector Seven without telling us right away. The first clue to their identity before its confirmed later would be that the arrest happened right after Glen said, "What's Sector Seven?", giving the organization an almost Beetlejuice-like quality.
