Miles better than the first three, but still not amazing or anything.
I was annoyed by a few things though.
Spoiler
-The daughter and her boyfriend were lame and uninteresting.
-Galvatron looked like shit.
-Grimlock didn’t speak, the Dinobots were made even dumber than they’re usually portrayed, and they didn’t do any real fighting outside of dino-mode. Not even a good “Me Grimlock”.
-Where the fuck did these new Autobots come from? Seriously, going by the timeline this movie gives, there was no time or reason for these new Autobots to appear. They came after Chicago, they so weren’t in any of the real action, and the government turned on all Cybertronians immediately afterwards, so they would have had to have gone into hiding as soon as they landed, which seems kind of dumb.
-The new autobots have a bunch of stupid robot versions of human things on them and it fucking drove me crazy. It was in the second and third movies as well, and it pissed me off even harder in this movie due to it being to the highest degree. Why the fuck does a robot have a metal beard, or a metal cigar, or a samurai helmet, or night vision goggles, or fucking dog tags, or a god damn metal trench coat/duster. It’s even more obvious since you have Optimus and Bumblebee right next to them, actually looking like fucking alien robots and not metal humans.
-The whole Megatron’s heads taking advantage of an earth scientist inventor, using him to design a new and more powerful body was lifted straight out of the Transformers Animated cartoon from a few years back. Yeah I watched it, I know a lot of people hated it, but I thought it was ok.
Not so many people dislike it any more after actually watching TFA.
“Ruined FOREVER”? Not this time! Even the genwunners loved it. Seriously.
Show is godlike.
LOL, How do the people who make TF shows get away with that sort of shit?
So much nightmare fuel for those not used to actual horror.
Fucking Waspinator got scary.
I didn’t like the man made transformers that didn’t have souls way of transformation. Their type of transformation was an excuse to be lazy and to keep the budget down.
Can’t say I disagree with you about the Dinobots but, who would you rather have riding Grimlock, Optimus Prime or Wheelie? Definitely a missed opportunity. We know that Transformers 5 is coming, so it’s gotta do something to make these “Legendary Knights” actually be Legendary.
A college bud and I do a hangout on air weekly based around the summer blockbuster that came out. After digesting the movie, I will say this, the inner fanboy in me appreciated all the awesome in it. It’s just that the movie is TERRIBLY edited, to the point that the running time is far from justified. However, I still walked out enjoying it. I think Bay wants to make a good movie but needs to find a way to make a cohesive vision using the tools that he has. I said in my hangout out that if you made Bay an football player, he’d be that kid that is just insanely fast in a straight line but if you make him do anything else, he becomes broken. IMO he’s got action down, but elements of anything other than mayhem and destruction, he has a hard time conveying the idea it seems. There was no need for Cade’s daughter or the boyfriend, as they really had no arc in the story at all. It could have been Cade and his daughter and that would have been good enough. “Lucky Charms” was only there for the chase (i thought it was a good one, but really wasn’t necessary). Cap 2 did a better chase without the extreme antics, so really, that character was pointless. I can see progress as the way the Autobots were characterized made them feel more like living things than just hunks of metal so he’s trying, but really needs to get some insight from the executive producer of this movie (Spielberg). That guy made you care about an alien that looks like a foot with eyes, so a fully sentient robot life form from the planet Cybertron should be a cake walk. However, characters and story I can’t blame him exclusively, because someone put a pen to that aspect of the movie. Ehren Kruger wrote it, so story elements are to blame him for. If we took out lucky charms entirely, there would have been virtually no change in this movie. All of the other humans could have had time to have been more fleshed out. If there are two things in the movie that I hated, it was the drone transformations (if you call it that) and “Lucky Charms”. I wanted Prime to take his face so badly.
The action spectacle was there, we just need a tighter script and a better editor to really make it do what it do. However, to say that you have had 4 passes and are still missing the chance for your magnum opus (with 2 on standby) you just gotta wonder when will they get it right. Each movie seems to take 2 steps forward and 1 step back.
Good to see that the thread is divided, but civil.
Well, I’ve been consistent - despite my dislike of the movie, everything needed to make it a good movie was there, but I think it goes beyond editting. I think there are systemic issues that need to be solved.
The design of the transformers has never bothered me, I wasn’t “oh they need to look like G1”, but after having 4 swings with the bat, its apparent that while I still don’t have an issue with the look, it makes fights WAY too hard to follow. It’s not just a matter of “proximity of the camera to the action”, but once you factor in lighting and elements, everything becomes a giant blob of grey at high speed. MBay’s solution is to ‘slow it down’ like Max Payne or whatever, but then it becomes an overdone mechanic with no flavor. This not only feeds the anti-MBay trolls, but takes away from the impact when you SHOULD slow things down. While for the next one, they shouldn’t ‘redo’ the look entirely, I’d be fully behind, slightly simplifying the looks, dropping facial feature for more singular piece construction, stronger color abstractions, smarter backdrops for combat (buildings that are all the same color just blend in), etc. Again, this is no ‘I want G1’ comment, just a systemix issue
Human interaction. They are there to help drive the plot. That’s fine. They seem overdone however. Why? Because if you look at the old TF tv show, there was a lot more time spent developing dialogue and relationships with the transformers. I’ve bitched about it since the first one, it was improved in the second one, and has been back downhill since. Fact A - this isn’t ‘Transformers’ - its ‘Optimus Prime’, this leads to Fact B, all other transformers are just props for Optimus, thus there is rarely if ever real dialog between them, and when there is, its of insignificant worth. Think about it, who’s interaction (as a Transformer) with a human has extended beyond a single sentence to state a fact, or beyond a simple ‘piece of information given to humans’, besides Optimus? What about Transformer to transformer conversation? We’ve had 4 films with maybe 10 hours worth of footage, and yet the only personalities we know are Optimus and Bumblebee. In this movie, when the Transformers talked amongst each other, it was useless banter that showed little depth of character. So, as I’ve said before, have Optimus ‘talk’ with other transformers besides the ‘mute’ Bumblebee - and not just orders. All those ‘feels’ that he has would be better expressed to the likes of Hound than a human. Same thing with the villain, stories are so much better when the villain team has at least somewhat fleshed out dynamics. This go around, Lockdown had a boat/arc of creatures and ‘henchmen’, yet never talked with any of them. Galvatron was no different. He’d raise the bar tremendously by simply doing that. I don’t think we’ve carred about any Transformer death thus far because either a) Optimus died in the middle of the second one so you knew he was coming back b) how he died was sad (opening of this one).
Raising the significance of the humans. Whalberg’s character was shooting and killing bad guys, with no military training and after finding a ‘weapon’ that was his size. Shia’s character always picked up something that made him central to the plot. Humans should be the accessory.
Those 3 things would make all the difference in the world. What wsa the point of having a robot mode for the dinobots? They never fought in it and never said anything in it. The ‘new’ transformation is easy to follow so I’m fine with it, and that goes along with my comment on #1. I’m sure if I forward past the human parts for this movie, it would play a lot better, similar to the last two.
That glorious editing. I remember the one car chase before lockdown comes down in his epicness to pwn shit, where it was so blatantly obvious they were on a nascar track, it was impossible to ignore it. Again, as stated above, horrible editing. It has redeeming qualities like lockdown being glorious, marky marks hot daughter, and some other cool shit, but while i can usually turn my brain off for transformers and other related movies, i went from cool, to huh, to wtf, to eh, i should just leave. Lol at that bud ice moment. I mean movies need to be funded, but god damn at that product placement moment, it was damn near a full on commercial.
I still wouldnt recommend paying to see this, but if the dvd or bluray wont be enough, and you just want your transformers experience in the theater, shitty or not, then i guess go for it.
Seriously, the editing was just mind bogglingly bad. I guess he had to focus more on ninja turtles or some shit, and didnt review the editing enough or some shit. Also, while the daughter was hot, i really hated how shitty she was. One moment she is mad at her dad, and then has his back. Her boyfriend comes in the picture and she turns into a complete cunt, until like the last 20 minutes where she is like, omg thank you so much dad, even though i have been praising my boyfriend the whole time when you have been protecting me. lol. I mean, bay shits on women in his movies fairly often. They are usually kinda shitty people, but this chick was kind of a dick.
I wish there was actually more hot girls in the movie. lol. I was waiting for like a party scene with her and her hot friends before a transformer shows up or some shit.
This scene was probably my favorite thing the whole movie.
Even with all the things we don’t like about this movie, one things is for sure.
There are three possible ways they can go from here.
[details=Spoiler]
Option A). Optimus Motherfucking Prime goes on a radical space adventure kicking ass and taking names until he finds his makers. No shitty humans, no stupid gimmicky new Autobots. All Optimus, all the time.
Option B). They have Galvatron be the big bad of the next movie, the Autobots have to deal with him with the absence of their great leader, the Dinobots might come back. Lame.
Option Never gonna fucking happen but it would be awesome though). Galvatron goes into action, Grimlock is the Autobot leader since Optimus is gone, the Dinobots actually do things like they should and there aren’t too many stupid new autobots that no one cares about.[/details]
That was the movie interpretation of Drift (ドリフト Dorifuto). Historically he’s a race car but happened to be some sort of triple changer in this movie
Wasn’t really explained. Maybe they were caught in other locales and escaped on Earth, scanned those as the mode of “transportation” and recaptured by Boba Fett Lockdown.
The Cybermatter AKA “Transformium” is more like an ore to create new transformers. G-Man was going to mine the ore and create additional drones from it by using the KSI lab in China. It affects organic material, so metal and non organic structure would remain intact. That is why it was taken to China.
Dunno why people are so surprised by the dinobots staying in dinosaur mode for the most part. Pretty sure they were almost always in dino mode when it was time to fuck shit up in the shows too.
lol reading all the review, the movie doesn’t even seem worth bootlegging
Heres another review from IHeartChaos
Still Michael Bay makes over a $100M last weekend, the man is a genius of sorts :lol: , his ability to turn shit into a billion dollar franchise is very George Lucas-esk
