In brief: This is a steaming pile of robot turd! Don’t bother ever watching it, ever!
SPOILER ALERT
In detail: I have to congratulate director Michael Bay on taking the amazingly brave choice to really push the ‘special effect’ genre of film to new lows, and possibly in the process having created a brand new genre of film: PLOTLESS
This has to be the first film I have ever seen were 100% of the plot happens off screen and you are just expected to accept what it happening and not worry about the details. The main character Sam (Shia LaBeouf) even questions this at one point in a failed attempt to be post-modern about it.
They do at a lot of cool new stuff, so surely that is enough to keep a fan interested? Well… no.
- Shiny new autobot ladies! Yah, some female characters. That get maybe two lines of dialog and don’t get give names and are often absent form the group shots of the good-guys.
- Transformers that can look human? WTF? Okay, surely they wouldn’t add something like that to the movie without giving up some background and explanation? Nope, nothing. We ass-ume she is a decepticon, but only because she is acting kinda ‘bad’. Maybe she is just really horny? We never see her talk to any other robot at all, and none of the others ever act as if they even knew she was there.
- Cybertron, home world of the transformers. Yay, at last. Odd that it only seems to take a few minutes to get there, but at least we are there. Surely they will show us some interesting stuff here and expand on the characters, the war between the transformers. Or perhaps instead of that just at a new badder bay-guy and show some still born transformer babies.
- Babies? What the what? Wow, I didn’t know that’s how new transformers are made, this will surely be an important part of the story. Or maybe just a bad rip off from Van Helsing.
- Robots have skeletons? Yeap, if you grab one by the tail and pull hard enough you can pull its whole skeleton out. Wow, that’s handy to know. But how about we hide that in a fast panned, motion blurred, two second shot.
So what is this movie all about? Two things. Farting and bollocks! No really, I mean it.
Farting robots and robot balls?
Last piece of the all-spark?
Giant powerful robots, standing around doing nothing, waiting for orders from humans?
Power-rangers ‘oh, i have a better weapon that i’ve never used before’?
Beginning. Middle. End. Facts. Details. Condense. Plot. Tell it.
—Simmons demands more coherent exposition from Jetfire. Seen @ Reading Cinema, Market City Ticket Price: $10