It's still hard to defend Transformers 3 as a movie, but boy oh boy is this a knockout of a 3D Blu-ray edition....
Paramount / 155 Minutes / 2011 / Rated PG-13 / Street Date: January 31, 2012
When it comes to Michael Bay movies I feel that it’s almost a disservice to include critiques revolving around “plot” or “dialogue”. Despite that, I would be remiss if I spent 600 words simply describing different explosions and how much my eyes still hurt, so here goes.
Transformers 3 picks up where Part 2 left off: Where that is, I have no idea, but at some point robots change into cars and Shia LaBeouf pretends to be a “leading man.”
For the most part the film sticks to the overall Bay template of chopped up sequences that waver between plucky comic relief and overbearing melodrama. Unlike in Revenge of the Fallen, Bay actually shows a little restraint here and barely keeps the film from tipping over into a total CGI-bomb.
There are still a few instances of computer animation that are just downright awful and have no business being in a movie much less viewed by people with eyes. While the fight sequences and high-tech stuff are bang on point it seems like Bay hired out the CGI of the human characters to one of the artists from Spongebob.
I could go on for hours picking apart nerdy things like “continuity” and “character motivation”, but I will try to keep my ranting to a minimum. For the most part, Transformers 3 works as a serviceable summer blockbuster; it has the “I should be excited now, shouldn’t I?” bass-heavy orchestral soundtrack, one-liners, fight scenes and ham-handed plot-twists that are the stock and trade of every Michael Bay film. Where it runs in to trouble is in two key parts. First, the movie’s pacing is all over the map and runs way-y-y-y-y too long: 154 minutes is ridiculous. Secondly, taking Megan Fox out of the film and replacing her with Rosie Huntington-Whitley, a woman whose default setting is “duck-face”, backfires to a frightening degree. I am shocked that I am typing these words but Megan Fox is a startlingly better actress than the barely-able-to-speak-without-reading-a-cue-card model Paramount hired in her place.
