21st Century, All-American Godzilla Movie

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2011)

When I was a kid, I used to watch Godzilla movies on TV every Saturday. Those movies always had these really long, boring passages with humans fighting other humans that I'd have to sit through in order to get to the good stuff: MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT! Transormers 3 is EXACTLY the same thing. Well, except for the "man in suit" part.
Godzilla movies were not known for their character development, their story lines, their nuance in dialog or deep themes. I loved them because I loved to see Godzilla do his thing. Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah... they didn't win many movie awards in their day. I could have happily watched 90 minutes of rubber monsters duking it out. Still could, scarily enough.
What we have with Transformers 3 is a Godzilla movie. Only this is not some low-budget affair with practical effects. This is an over-budgeted, over-produced, CG monstrosity with a master who somehow manages to keep it on a leash! In 3-D!!! Michael Bay, one of my least-favorite directors working in A-list Hollywood these days, has made his masterpiece. This is the biggest, fastest, loudest and perhaps MEANEST 150 minutes (yes, this mofo is 2 1/2 hours long!) I've spent in a movie theater in a long while. Bay stages action sequence after robot fight scene after explosion after pervy booty shot after another in an endless loop of adolescent ecstasy.
That's right, adolescent. I got real childish kick out of it. I'm 35 years old. But it was similar moments in movies from when I was a kid, those initial HOLY COW-PAT moments, like seeing Mary Poppins jump into a picture or Darth Vader slice off Luke's hand or Godzilla laying the smack-down on Mecha-Godzilla, that made me the movie lover I am today! There is fully one hour of AWESOME in the movie. The other 90 minutes, the human scenes, are tripe. Lousy story (who knows what's going on?), lousy characters (it's impossible to distinguish any of the Transformers, other than the two red-and-blue ones), lousy acting, comedic moments that land with a thud, lamentable dialog. But Bay keeps his camera during these human scenes firmly trained on the supple curves of the romantic lead, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, with some vintage Bay Dirty-Old-Man Cam, and that makes the proceedings much, much easier. He clearly takes none of this seriously, which is a good thing. After all, it's a movie about ROBOTS SMASHING ROBOTS! It's not about these 90 minutes of human nonsense. It's about the other 60 full of AWESOME.
And what 60 they are. Robots smashing robots. Robots shooting robots. Ripping apart other robots. Blowing up other robots. Astronauts exploring alien wreckage on the moon. Serpentine robots sailing through buildings like the Loch Ness Monster. Soldiers sailing across the Chicago skyline while dastardly machines try to shoot them down... IN 3-D!!! Mindless action the likes of which we haven't seen since Toho was crushing model tanks under latex feet. On a much higher budget.
And let's hear it for 3-D!!! Avatar really disappointed me. Like, REALLY disappointed me. But in Transformers 3... wow, AWESOME. For 60 of the 150. (67 if you include all the 3-D booty shots.) 60 minutes, by the way, is an incredible amount of time for flat-out action in a single movie. In the Godzilla movies, you were lucky to get 20-30. Then again, those movies were half as long.
The first 20 minutes of Transformers 3, which tie the ensuing storyline to the first moon landing, are a tour de force of contemporary, big-budget Hollywod filmmaking: dynamic, gripping, utterly stupid, completely absorbing. Easily the best thing I have evah seen from Michael Bay. EVAHHH.
I hated the first Transformers movie. Hated, hated, HATED it. You couldn't PAY me to watch the second one after the unanimous HATE it got. But this one, number 3, was *exactly* what I wanted. It was like I was in my backyard with two of the original Hasbro toys in my hands, banging them together in a fight to the finish... only much, much louder.