It's weird, I hated most of the other movies (my most tolerated one was the first) and know I am a HUGE G1 fan, regardless of how silly some people say it is.

That being said, I read reviews and went into this movie with LOW expectations.. and I liked it. There, I said it. I LIKED IT.

I have bashed the movies really hard, and I didn't like the design aesthetic in general, but there was something about this one,... maybe it was who lived and who died,.. maybe it was there was no jittery Shia present.. but something felt better. Not GREAT, but better. I was impressed with John Goodman's role as Hound, which I was greatly expecting to hate from the early pictures. It was not a "good" movie by any account, and the ending is ridiculous, but my 7 year old son dusted off his transformers and played his heart out afterwards, and I was reminded that it's all about fun... and selling stuff. LOL..

 

You know it's funny. The most important things these movies fail to do is make us actually care about the consequences of what's happening on screen.

The characters are rarely fleshed out in a way that makes us care whether or not they're blown up, discarded, etc... The locations are only eye candy; you never really give a crap about anything that gets blown up, so eventually the explosions themselves just become a kind of white noise.

But the open of this movie (as silly as it was) got all of that stuff right at first. The downtrodden family, the goofy well-meaning father who tries to do right by his daughter, the good-guy best friend... and finally war-ravaged, crippled Optimus Prime. You felt for them in the beginning, and were actually kind of nervous when the government shows up.

Even the Kelsey Grammer intro got me actually wondering, "Who is this guy? Why is he so hateful."

But all of that gets thrown out the window the minute OP explodes out of that barn. And instead of revisiting any of the themes that got the movie going to remind us why we should give a crap, the movie just barrels ahead, throwing whatever ridiculous plot device it has to to keep the machine rolling on, endlessly noiselessly, and seemingly without reason (unless it's to "get the cube!" "get the matrix!" "get the spacebridge!" "get the seed!").

This one probably frustrated me more than any of the others because in the beginning, I cared who lived, who died, what was at stake, but it completely devolved for me after that.

EDIT - I wrote all that to agree with you, that at first I thought their was something better about this one.

 

Have you READ All Quiet on the Western Front!? People are dying left and right! Paul's friends suffer terrible fates, and Paul does too in the end. There are descriptions of people's body's getting caught in barbed wire, arms ripping off, scattered limbs in the forests, people getting blown to smitherines by artillery fire!

 

This is basically us now, isn't it.

 

Possibly because the film wasn't that good.

 

I agree with you completely on this.

 

Simply and to the point.
Their job is to ... critique the movie. Their is job is not ignore obviously bad parts because they are just there to see robots punch each other.

They judge the whole movie not just a piece of it. And i think most critics do say that some of the action scenes are fine but this movie was not just those actions scenes in the almost 3 hour run time.

 

Yes. I was invested and interested at first more than I thought I would be at first. It started darker and got more cartoonish as we went along. But I was not bored as it barrelled ahead. It was kind of like pacifc rim or elysium. Giving us new toys to play with at every turn and hardly useing all of them.

Fine I'll critique three things:

-The Dinosaur excavation at the beginning of the movie could have totally served for your dinobots to awaken. Instead its merely a remnant of the creators cyberforming earth in the past, which is vaguely relevant to the capabilitys of the seed, and who lockdown is working for.

- The product placement may have paid for the extended Autobot screen time. But they should have had more confidence the movie would do financially well enough at the box office by this point to risk the money and not go the advertiseing route. Though maybe it was a satirical jab at the first movies product placements as well? With almost all of them exploding and the cute Oreo robot much like dispensor. It did not contribute to the plot or characters for sure, it was kind of a meta joke at best. Paramount needs to stop being so damn cheap and greedy with this franchise considering how much money its making.

- A lack of clarity when important things are happening with the robot characters. Some people did not get that the Autobots got the Dinobots the legendary knights, From that part of lockdowns ship they detached, or that they had brought it to china. Also When did Prime arm up his rocket boosters? Were they something from the ship?

Fix or ignore those things and its pretty great.

 

nailed it. though the OP's edit amusingly addresses this.

 

I really agree with iceburn9's post.

One reason why people diss the TF movies, is that people are sheep, and follow the crowd. People can be very easily influenced by the general consensus.

I have one friend, that saw TF 1, 2, and 3 in theaters. After he saw each of them, he would tell me that he really liked them, and I could feel the enthusiasm in his voice and face. Yet, after time passed, he'd start to talk about how horrible the movies were. This particular friend, I hate to say, isn't very bright, and I strongly believe that he simply started to think the Bayformer movies were crap due to hearing other people making fun of them.

One time, he started to say that the movies were garbage, so I mentioned to him that he once told me that he liked them after seeing each one of them. He acknowledged that what I said was in fact true. But then he said that he didn't know why he changed his mind, and suggested that it may be due to hearing others complain about them.

I have another friend that liked TF1, and bought the dvd/bluray. He wasn't a fan of TF2, but he saw TF3, and told me that he actually liked it, as if he was expecting it to be crap. And of course, during casual conversations with other people, I hear him referring to the Bayformer films as garbage. Even though he has the first movie, and told me that he liked the 3rd one after seeing it.... One of his other friends constantly talks about how bad the films are, so I figured he has to hate the movies out of peer pressure or something.

Now, I know that it is completely possible for people to legitimately change their feelings about a movie a while afterwards, after stopping and thinking about some of the stuff within it. But if you liked something, and everyone else around you openly bashes it, there will always be that feeling of fear that you might be seen as stupid.

For me, growing up as a kid, some of my close friends would make fun of fat people, or describe things they didn't like as being 'gay' (not straight). Like a fool, I would mimic their attitude, against my better judgment. One friend would constantly make fun of certain comic and video game characters, and even though I kind of liked those characters, I would openly hate on them too, to try to win approval, or just because I was too dumb to think for myself. I've seen people all around that do this. That's just how people are.

It is very cool and hip to bash Michael Bay. I know that a lot of people don't like his work. I can totally see why. TF4 deserves bad reviews (but not as bad RT's score) But because so many people are hating, I would imagine that many movie critics will go into a new TF Bay film with lots of negative preconceptions. They may have already decided that they will detest the movie.

 

I have a theory: They hated it cause it sucked.

 

I have a few theories: They hated it cause they overanalyzed it.
They hate it cause Michael Bay directed it.
They hate it cause the trailers thus never actually saw it.
They hate it cause they have their own opinions.

Should I go on?


jD001

 

The only thing i don't like about it is the writer, i love the film and the action scene. But it took me like centuries to figure out what is their true origin

 

It is panned because, it sucked, though some people liked it for what it is, and some refuse to knock ANYTHING Transformers related, but it's panned NOT just by critics, but a lot of fans.....because it sucked.

 

I would agree with this. I think it is just the length, the plotholes, the immense product placement, the over-sexualization of a kid's toy franchise, the crappy designs of the robots making it hard to tell what part is what (though better in this movie), and the fact that the cameraman looks like he has epillepsy and it is SO hard to see things in the movies clearly.

 

I'll add Prime killing a human (though I dig him being brutal towards the 'Cons), the fact that unless you read the credits at the end or are a collector you won't know the bot's names, and the constant profanity in a movie that has toys in Toys r us to that list.