Today I saw Transformers 3 with one of my friends, and, after thinking about it for a bit, here's my honest opinion.
Going into this movie, I knew to judge it on a "mindless fun" level, and even that, I had problems with the movie. No, I'm not going to play the "dumb" card, I wouldn't judge this movie based on that aspect, but, in my personal opinion...the movie's main problem was that, IMO it was dull.
"But how can it be dull? It's about giant robots fighting each other!" Watching this movie, having a watch on me, I realized just how little of the movie was the aforementioned fighting robots. All the mayhem and chaos you see in the trailers doesn't really occur till the last 45 or so minutes of this 2.5 hour movie. And even during that final act, most of the action is humans fighting the decepticons, not robot vs. robot.
The biggest sin the Transformers trilogy had is that it never was truly focused on the robots. The character of Sam gets the majority of the screentime, and honestly, despite Optimus delivering the final blow in the end, you could never call Prime the main character of this. And, for the most part, I didn't care for the human characters in this, except for the one who turns out to be evil....
As I said before, I did like the final act. The "collapsing tilted skyscraper" bit was IMO awesome. But prior to the ending, there isn't an action scene that goes on long enough to really be considered an action scene.
As for the fight scenes themselves...they were over too easy, IMO. All 3 of the main villains goes down with 1 successful attack by the heroes. Once the good guys got the advantage in a fight scene, it was pretty much over. I felt the ending lost tension as it went on, but it never became really bad.
Now, like I said prior, the main problem I had with these movies is that they really aren't about "giant robots fighting each other". In fact, I'd have to say that the human characters were arguably more important then the transformer chars, at least the autobots. The Transformers are supporting characters in the series named after them...
To be fair, it could be part budgetary issues. Even with the around 200 Million dollar budget, maybe having more frequent fight scenes would have brought the budget up to astronomical levels that they thought they weren't likely to earn back in the box office. Who knows.
So, in conclusion, I judged this movie on a "mindless fun" scale, like I said. But nevertheless, because it takes a while for the action to really get going, and how relatively little (and even then, how quickly it went by) of the expected "giant robots fighting each other", I personally found it dull.
Out of 10, I'll give it a 5-5.5. Nothing terrible, but nothing I'd really watch again unless a friend was playing at their house.
And one last note: If you liked/loved this movie, I'm fine with that, and I'm not going to criticize you.
