Let's just get one thing out of the way. I enjoyed this movie a whole lot more than I enjoyed the last one, but not as much as I enjoyed the first and I think I liked the first one more because of the novelty of the whole thing than it was a really good movie. In the long run I think this is the movie that will stand the test of multiple viewings.
If I were to sit down with Michael Bay to ask him one question I think it would be, "do you hate Chicago?" cause that city got beat up real bad in the last hour or so. Seriously, was Roget Ebert's reviews of your movies so bad you decided to destroy the city he lives in? I visited Chicago, I liked Chicago, and to see it trashed the way it was, seeing places I had visited was just brutal to watch. Seeing is citizens vaporized like that was harsh. Seeing both Autobot and Decepitcons trashing buildings without a care, well, what can I say, next time I visit the city I'll place a wreath next to the building that fell over in honor of all those fake people who lost their lives.
I'm having a really hard time coming up with an opinion on this movie, mostly because if you see it excepting something other than large robots fight each other and destroy a city you won't get it. All the same stuff from the other two movies are in this one (minus the racist robot siblings, thank goodness.) Will Sam's parents embarrass him? Check! Will Sam's girlfriend get in trouble and he'll need to rescue her? Check! Will Megatron be a total wuss? Check! Actually, that last one angers me more than the racists robots. In the cartoon Megatron was the man, he was a bad ass who could go toe to toe with all the Autobots save Prime and come out on top. In the first movie he's beaten by Sam! In the second he bows down to another Decepticon, in this one he's a brain damaged robot who follows orders from yet another bad guy! I mean, whatever happened to the Decepticon who, when Unicon tells him he was summoned his reply is, "No one summons Megatron!" Heck, even Starscream had a better badass moment that Megatron and that's just sad! As you can tell, Megatron is my favorite, followed by Starscream.
Okay, so, might as well just go with the highlights then in nice, handy dandy list:
Things I liked:
The best scene in the entire movie was the paratroopers flying through Chicago. The shot was simply amazing and what made it even more amazing was that it wasn't a special effect, it looked like they just but winged suits on a bunch of guys and dropped them from a plane and filmed them flying over Chicago. Sure, I knew some of the shots were effects but I'd say about 80% of the sequence was really happening as it was being filmed and that really made it amazing.
Really, the last hour or so when the battle of Chicago started was really cool. The pacing felt just right and some of the stuff that happened was fun. From the tilting skycrapper, to the fighting in the streets, to the scenes of Decepticons hanging from buildings waiting to go into action, it all felt right and it felt like an epic Transformers movie.
Laserbeak, what a great addition to the franchise. Loved him in the movie, I'm just wondering where Soundwave was.
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley: Nuff said!
Things I didn't like:
Most of the humor sucked as normal. The parents, not funny. The small robots, well except for one line, not funny.
All the Star Trek nods because Lenord Nemoy was one of the voices. I thought the first one was fun, when they were watching the Star Trek Episode when Spock goes nuts. The second one, not sure if it was a nod or not but it felt like one, the third one was kind of "wha?" But, okay, the forth one was pretty good I thought. I think that was the only one we needed cause it was funny and it made everyone who got the joke laugh so, instead of four how about just one really good one next time, huh?
Except for a few robots most of the Autobots and Decepticons were hard to keep track of, when are they going to fix that?
Megatron being a wuss, see above.
Transformers 3 really does deliver on what you'd expect. I sometimes find it amazing as I watch Transformers repeats on Hub that the silly cartoon I loved as a kid is now a movie franchise making billions of dollars world wide.
