A complete waste of time

Rating: Null/10 (14 November 2011)

I know that Michael Bay is the king of crap, and in that regard slamming one of his movies for being a jumbled mess is probably pointless. But still, despite myself I enjoyed the first two Transformers-movies. The first more than the second, but the second was alright all things considered. There has always been a mental cramp when it comes to comic-relief and the scripts have always been paper-thin. But something still appealed to me, I guess I could blame my 1980's childhood with a box full of Transformers-toys.
First of all, I said before that the scripts were paper-thin for the previous Transformers-movies. Considering that, this movie seems written on a napkin and then added to and subtracted from in a system of loose papers. Then someone dropped the pile of papers and all the pages got mixed up and nothing was where it was supposed to be... But Michael Bay seemed to say "screw it, we'll just shoot the movie anyway". If I say that this movie makes no sense, I'm being as kind as I could ever be. Most of the time it's just a confused mess of events piled on top of each other. There is no cohesion at all, there is no plausible connection to the story from the first two movies. I understand that the writers were probably struggling here to find a new approach and create something out of nothing story-wise. But they chose the wrong direction. Completely.
Second point, this movie is almost one hour too long. There are so many places where this movie could have been cut, trimmed and polished. It would even have helped with the story because it's such a mess now that you could remove most of it without it really detracting from your understanding.
Third point, this movie wastes a few pretty good actors. And no, I don't mean Gray's Anatomy, but rather John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. I think that for them this was a fire-and-forget movie. Just go in there, do the scenes, forget about it and smile when you see your bank-draft. Because people are not the main thing here, the special effects are. There is no room for characters, proper dialog or building good drama. It seems like Bay sat in his directors chair and said "Oh, these people have been talking for almost a minute, let's have a robot smash through the wall and break something before people fall asleep".
In the end this really is a complete waste of time. Special effects are, just like in the previous movies, very well done indeed. Product placements are very obvious and hugely embarrassing for all involved, especially for the companies that payed to be shown in such a crap movie. I guess if you are twelve years old and have ADD there might be something here for you, but everyone else should just stay away. This is a brainless blockbuster in every wrong way imaginable.