I Really Liked Explosions #47 and #83

Rating: 5/10 (7 July 2011)

You will read a common refrain in every review about TF3, the overlong series of explosions that make up the final hour of the film. I came into this movie with low expectations. I expected the low-rent dialogue that would normally be rejected by a bargain basement sitcom. I expected nonsensical plot points, that can be easily seen as a convenient way to BLOW SOMETHING UP. Yes, something must blow up every 15 seconds, or we are ready to pull up our twitters. I came for the spit shined special effects by ILM, still setting the bar of all VFX houses. Indeed there are more rendered frames of CGI than probably "The Phantom Menace". Thankfully, Michael Bay had to decaffeinate his editing in order to have the full 3D effect. I could actually understand the geography of the action sequences for the first time in a Transformers movie. Until the final hour, that is.
Bay did a lot of things right this time. He has less screen time of dumb dialogue and just goes straight to the eye candy we all came for anyway. The slower editing pace, finally, gives the audience a chance to look at these mangled pieces of metal animated as if they are surreal sculptures (or even like that icky exhibit of frozen bodies). Some have half their brains blown out, or an eye blown out. Every megamechatron has like ten thousand little parts that you can see, meaning it overwhelms your Imax 3D vision with information to digest. That's what was precisely wrong with TF2. No one could make heads or tails of who was the bad robot and who was the good robot. Now we get more than 10 frames to glimpse each CGI extravaganza of little truck or car parts. I compare this to "The Phantom Menace" since both are films are similar in which the filming of the live actors has no feeling of being connected to the uber-robot battle going on behind them. No matter whether our hero and heroine get trapped in a collapsing building, or get tossed into a brick wall, they bounce back like Looney Tunes characters.
There is not much to say about the story or the acting. Other than regurgitating file footage of the space program that has been seen already for decades on the big screen. I was yawning almost immediately as we spend the first twenty minutes watching something from the History Channel reviewing our proud accomplishments in space. Although there is the alternate universe being described, it's still the same cliché footage we've seen over and over. A complete waste of the audience's time. In my editorial mind I thought, I could have saved everyone's precious time by just cutting to the big hook, one of those voltron gobot thingies crashed on the moon. There, setup over, let's move on. Shia Labeouf is trapped with everyone else in a one dimensional character, so I do not blame them for looking like cardboard. I was almost ready to compliment Michael Bay for not even pretending any characters have any anchor in reality, and just having each moment of revelation be merely a beat and move on. Yeah we know the nice looking guy is really a bad guy. Yeah, we know the shady robot has something to hide. Now let's BLOW SOMETHING UP.
There are literally at least 100 separate shots of big explosions in this film. Each one is lovingly framed, many in slow motion, Ka-Bloom! A large ball of fire, then some smaller debris shooting away, and a cloud of smoke. Bay must of had played with fireworks as a kid. I found myself smiling at the incessant explosions at first, then by time we enter hour 3, it becomes simply monotonous. Believe it or not, each explosion should have meaning, or we are just watching a 4th of July show. This explosion is important because it is putting our good guys in peril. That explosion is important because it is sending dangerous debris into harm's way. Instead of that, TF3 has explosion after explosion, with no real context, that you start to get burned out. Bay apparently wanted to make the central character of the movie the actual explosions, anticipating that 12-year-olds will get excited after every explosion goes off. But I pose this question to the editor and director: If you are throwing literally dozens of explosions as part of the big finale, won't the audience start losing track of what the significance of one explosion was along with the others? "Remember explosion #64? That was a real good explosion".
Which brings us to the last hour. The film goes way overtime by making sure we get to experience every last building and vehicle blow up in Chicago. Someone should have confronted Bay and forced him to cut a few minutes. Literally, most of the final battle does not wow you, it begins to annoy you, since it has no meaning anymore. About 10 minutes after I felt like the film should have been wrapping up i wanted to yell, "Can I go home now?", But no, another 20 minutes of sensory overload to the point I didn't care if he got the girl in the end or not.