I really haven't been getting enough use out of this blog recently, I must post my thought more, it makes me feel more productive even if nobody's reading what I have to say. I assume.
Transformers then. Transformers is a film series based off a cartoon franchise based off a line of toys, always the origin of a hollywood epic I'm sure. To put a long story short, I rather liked this film, though I suspect my fondness is distorted by the fact that like most sequels, I had to compare it to the other two Transformers films, which I wanted to like but was less enthusiastic about watching. And just as being not as good a sequel as the original can drag a good work down (Portal 2 for instance, and arguably Paul, even if that's not technically a sequel.), being a good sequel to a meh series can make you put it on a much higher podium, whether it deserved it or not, but I liked this film despite those feelings.
I think the main reason is that it fixed two ever present problems the previous two films had. Whereas the first two had too much of Sam, who's role in the plot of the Cybertronians was always very boring, and not nearly enough of the Transformers who's names the average viewer could remember (Which for me was Optimus Prime, Bumbleblee and Megatron.). DOTM fixed those pretty quickly, I actually found myself caring more about what Sam got up to, because whereas in the first two Sam wanted little to do with what mess the Autobots dragged him into, he's now seeking out a plot rather than just having it land on his lap. And Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are featured far more in their own film, and do in fact do much more. I'm still annoyed that they first appeared an hour into the first film and Prime was barely in the second for obvious reasons, so instantly I was more interested.
Another thing I liked about this film was that I felt that stuff was mattering. In the first two films (I keep using those words.) I didn't get the impression that the presence of the large alien robotic organisms was having much of an impact on the world as a whole, we only see it affect the main human characters and the army, with the rest of the world not noticing the multi story tall robots running around. But in this film, they apparently noticed that the Autobots were bloody hard things to hide and are revealed to the world, making it seem like they were there much more there. I especially like roughly the beginning of the third act-ish when the main villain basically turns an entire city into a War-Zone and is about to enslave all of mankind, unlike the first film where a city is a battleground and nobody seems to remember. So the fact that things were happening was far more interesting, especially given the villain's cartoonishly unrealistic plot.
Though even without having to nitpick, there's still a lot of things I don't like about the film. And most of these problems are more a problem with the series as a whole, but I digress. The most unavoidable part is in the scenes where the Autobots are fighting the Decepticons alongside the humans. Just to be clear, the average Transformers is one to two stories to tall, meaning the human soldiers can just about touch their feet, and the problem with having them fight together is that you can never see all of it at once, because they try to focus on both fights at once, we can barely see anything because the film tries to keep them both in, so when we see the humans, we can barely see the Transformer they're fighting, and when we see the Transformers, the humans are just a coloured blob. So the action is always very cluttered. Though granted even in the exclusivity Transformer centric fights, you can still barely tell what's going on. One thing that the filmmakers don't seem to grasp is that if you're going to go the effort of painstakingly model, animare and render every Transformer so realistically, the audience would like to see them. They're barely on the screen before the shot changes to a different angle, meaning that lots of their hard work is wasted. And I know how detailed it looks because the transforming sections, I'm told are very accurate and make perfect scientific sense.
Tl;DR: The fighting scenes are too cluttered to enjoy or understand.
Another thing that bugs me is that the fighting scenes themselves go on for far too long, because after the battle begins in the city, it just keeps on going for ages, which viewers of Revenge of the Fallen who hated the battle in the dessert will find annoyingly familiar.
I would complain about the acting in the film, but the average acting quality in the film can best be summarised by two moments within the film where Shia LeBouf's character screams bloody murder for an extended period of time, which was the hardest I've ever laughed in a film, more than any carefully crafted joke. Because no matter how clever, witty or well thought out a joke is, there's something about an amusing sound that throws out your common sense and stimulate a part of your brain reserved for laughing at comedicly timed farts.
One main thing did rub me up the wrong way, which probably shouldn't do, was the Science of the film. I shouldn't complain that a Transformers film is Scientifically inaccurate, but aside from a few issues with mass a few times, the films generally followed real world Science alongside their own rules. But there is one scene where a few Autobots go to the moon and I was noticing the fact that the Transformers weren't leaving metre deep footprints, the fact they were moving the same speed as on Earth, and the fact that noises were happening. The last one I can generally allow but the first two were far too obvious.
One last thing that I really hated about the film was a single scene within it that took place inside Chernobyl. For those not in the know, Chernobyl is a small town nearby a power plant that, due to complications, had a meltdown and released a ton of Nuclear Fallout on the town making it uninhabitable, killing many people and affecting the lives of thousands of others. This happened in 1986. Transformers: Dark of the Moon seems to informs us that this was the fault of the alien baddies. The deaths of real life people were caused by aliens trying to get their tech working or something like that, rather than the result of human error. I'm certain I got more than a few of my facts wrong in real life and in the film, but even so I'm glad I don't know anybody affected by this or it would have irritated me far more than it already did.
To put a long story short, the story is more interesting than the action, both of which are more interesting than the previous films. I'd recommend it to somebody as stupid as I am, because I can easily be distracted by what is clearly a popcorn film. There's definitely been better films this year but this can hold me attention for its two hours.
