Much better than I remember

Rating: 10/10 (15 April 2020)

I was reluctant to watch this the first time because of the panning and beating this film got from the critics of the time. But after watching this again, I believe it was totally unwarranted.
A lot of work went into this film including one explosion that took seven months to set up for one-shot.
The relationship between Sam and Mikaela was made stronger especially on her side, which was my largest complaint about replacing Megan Fox in dark of the moon.
I hadn't realized that Peter Cullen has always been the voice of Optimus prime, I had been assuming that they chose a different actor that was able to emulate that great voice. But this is actually Optimus prime.
And the state of the art for this film supersedes the first transformers film by an exponential factor. They were able to do things here that made the CGI much more believable, also the use of practical effects in a lot of places makes it very difficult to see what is CGI and what is not. Sometimes when a transformer was in the scene, it would be a real prop as was the case with bumblebee. Also parts of Megatron.
The story itself was based on certain aspects of the 1984 transformers movie.
It is too bad that the public reacted so negatively to this, so much hard work went into it. And it brings in new auto bot characters, some of which continued through the franchise.