Here are my thoughts about this movie:
Let's start with the good stuff. It's another typical Michael Bay film. The action scenes are well planned through and quite amazing. Love all the great SFX...and there are a ton of those. Those effects satisfy a lot what I expect from a SiFi inspired Action Movie.
Let's move onto the things that just don't work for me. Whoever chose to replace Megan Fox with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley had to be entirely out of his mind. I'm not saying she's a bad actress, but she and Shia LaBeouf have absolutely no chemistry at all. That pretty much kills that part of the plot. There 'love story' comes of as completely artificial, fake and cheesy. Of all the movies I have seen in my entire life, that has to be the worst chemistry between 2 actors!
The next thing that is quite bothersome is the need to anchor the plot by using real historical events in order to kinda rationalize the existence of the movie. That really seems to be a trend lately and it is quite annoying. I don't need to rationally set up the plot of an action movie by using historical events. After all it's a action movie and not and documentary. The Transformers crashed on the moon. Good...let's start from there. There would have been absolutely no need to sprinkle lots of conspiracy theory over it.
The entire subplot with the job search is kinda insulting my intelligence. Michael Bay needs to get a grip of reality. Someone saves the entire planet from destruction, gets awarded a 'hero medal' and has a problem of finding a job? People get back to reality..that's just not the way it works in real life. I do realize that it was just done to set up the coming events...but there had to be a better way to do that.
The dialogue has no particular style or whit except when Malkovich adds his own spin. But other than that I had the feeling with the dialogues throughout the movie, that nobody really took the time to pay close attention to them and actually tried to develop them. A little less SFX and a little more time spent on dialogue would have quite been an improvement.
Beings as technologically advance as the Decepticons not realizing that the Autobots haven't left...well, I'm just not buying it. That they need visual confirmation of the Autobots leaving by Sam, well that's just bad writing.
I did love the battle scenes, as they're well planned out and quite fun to watch. A Transformer cutting a building in half and it's slowly tilting over, while the humans try to escape. Please people get real. Transformers or not, on this planet the laws of physics still apply. A building cut in half doesn't just slowly tilt over on land on another building creating a 'fairly stable' bridge, while allowing the humans to escape fairly easy. In the future Michael Bay would be well advised to not entirely negate the laws of physics. Another very funny thing is the lowering on the bridges. Here Michael Bay really should have done his research. You can't remotely lower the bridges by using the Internet. That's just not the way it works. If it did, every hacker would constantly be doing that.
The entire Optimus 'love story' for America is so fake and so cheesy, that it should have never ever been in the movie to begin with and it doesn't do anything to the plot at all!
Moving on to the final battle scene...Absolutely loved it!! I would have loved to have gotten an explanation why the chose Chicago as their hub to bring Cybertron to Earth. They subplot of Sentinel's exact reasoning for betraying Optimus and how he intends to control the Decepticons isn't being not explored at all. Exploring that subplot would have given the movie way more depth.
Sam's girlfriend has one job in the movie: to look pretty. Here on line towards the end of the last beetle scene comes off as particularly fake and cheesy. Maybe it's just me but for being a superhero Shia certainly doesn't play much of a roll for the first 2/3's of the movie.
In general there was a disconnect between the action parts of the movie and those parts that should set up the action scenes. While the action scenes move along almost at the speed of light, the scenes setting up the action scenes stand out as being particularly slow. In my opinion that was quite annoying throughout the entire movie. A little less speed during the action scenes and a little more speed during the scenes setting up the action sequences would have made this a more enjoyable movie experience. In my personal opinion this the the weakest movie of the Transformer Franchise so far.
With all that being said, I still think it's a great action movie with stunning visual effects. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 6.8!!
Sounds like a typical Transformers movie.. I still haven't seen it but I plan too.. it's a fun popcorn, don't think about it kind of movie. Thanks for the review.
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