https://youtu.be/WWWDskI46Js

It took getting Bay off these for me to get excited about a Transformers movie. Shit looks hard as fuck.

Bumblebee was really good and this looks absolutely FLAMES. The Transformers dont just look like a bunch of twisted metal with legs anymore. Thank god.

>Bumblebee was really good and this looks absolutely FLAMES.
>The Transformers dont just look like a bunch of twisted metal
>with legs anymore. Thank god.

But I understand the sentiment

My favorite Autobot got turned into a Pontiac Solstice and ripped in half. Hated that. Now, if that Porsche happens to be Jazz in the movie, they can take my money

I have no interest in Transformers after what Bay did to the franchise, but this is clearly what they should have looked like from the start.

Forgot to say yesterday that as someone who doesn't fuck with TRANSFORMERS (outside of BEAST WARS), these movies have come a long way from the overlong, overblown, wild misogynistict and racist, bombastic Michael Bay movies.

I will gladly watched significantly scaled-down (in every way possible) TRANSFORMERS films that have heart, well-shot action, minorities in the lead roles (shout out to Anthony Ramos & Dominique Fishback. Long overdue), Pete Davidson as a Transformer making wild inappropriate jokes that have me rolling, and a soundtrack filled with Wu-Tang, A Tribe Called Quest, LL Cool J (a needle drop that brought the audience to its feet), SWV, Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., Black Sheep, and Digable Planets... then I'm all the way in.

The big reveal in the last scene of the movie had the audience yell in excitement. The energy was infectious.

My brother is right tho. Between this and SPIDER-VERSE, we need more black people in charge of franchises.

Is this a continuation from that movie?

Yeah I saw BUMBLEBEE and thought it was okay.

It's a loose sequel as the acknowledge it, but not explicitly.

Good casting for the human roles (plus limiting how many there were was smart). Based on the trailers I thought I was gonna be rolling my eyes at the music choices, but it all fit into the movie well. Didn’t feel forced. And I could actually tell what was happening during the action sequences lol.

Like, say what you will about the Bay movies and their scripts and their editing... but the machines looked *visceral.* They were big, they were heavy, they were chrome, they interacted with their environment, they felt *real.* In this, everything feels too light. They move quickly like humans without the sense of size and scale. Their surfaces are so smooth. They don't interact much with things that are real, and when they do, it looks really cartoony (none of the times a character is picked up work at all). It's just so composited in, so weightless, so non-interactive. Which is disappointing, because I thought even in Bumblebee, the effects made the robots feel *real*!

And I think this speaks to a relative lack of style. It feels like exactly what it is-- the Next Franchise Installment-- rather than something with memorable vision (the Bay movies, for better and for worse) or particularly clever execution (Bumblebee). It's kind of like Caple Jr's entry into the Creed franchise. Coogler's voice and eye are so distinctive, and even if parts of Creed III didn't really work for me, it's very clear that Jordan had a unique vision to put his stamp on the franchise. Creed II is a totally fine generic Rocky style movie, and that's more or less what we get with this franchise sequel.

That said, what I *did* really like about this movie is its commitment to being as earnest as possible. There's no smirky one-liners, no tongue-in-cheek Ryan Reynolds-esque irony here. It's a movie that's more than happy to go all-the-way corny from Scene 1, and while the movie mostly bored me for the first hour or so, I admit that, over time, the clear-eyed earnestness won me over.

And that led to the finale really working for me because, while I'm tired of blurry gray textureless CGI settings for final battles (and this definitely has that), the script builds to enough Big Crowd-Pleasing Moments that work, one after the other, that on the whole it ends the movie on a high note. (There's one music cue that will deservedly get applause-- and the soundtrack is great in general.)

So, y'know, if I was 12, I'd have eaten this shit up. And if you were super in love with Transformers when you were a kid, maybe you'll get more of a nostalgia boost than I did and it'll make you feel like you're 12 again. I just wish the visuals/direction of the movie was more stylish, clever, distinctive-- to help separate this entry from the pack. As it stands, it's a totally fine matinee-type movie imo. Not the worst of these, but not one I'm really likely to remember.

and I'm not going to rewatch all the Bay movies (but I do remember the design of the Transformers was too busy to appreciate anyway)

I do agree that is was fine, enjoyable, not too memorable, but moved quick enough to have a good time

The editing is still what it is, but everything's more visceral, the colors brighter, the explosions very obviously real. After watching nearly a decade where everything is all cartoony CGI and green screens and flat lighting and weirdly desaturated sheen, Bay's particular brand of mayhem feels like a stand-out from the pack. Dark of the Moon in particular-- the final third of that would rank among the better action sequences of the last 5-10 years if released today.

The humor is still infantile and regressive, and obviously a couple of these movies feel a thousand hours long, but I just love that Bay clearly starts with color and chaos and flame and light and goes about his movie from there. This new one is fine enough but also feels very Created In A Room With Twenty Execs-- and there's an increasingly large part of me that would rather watch a singular potential calamity than watch color-by-number aspiring blockbusters. I know I'm relatively alone on that, but it's where I feel my tastes drifting, lol.

that last interview actually got me kinda hype.

and how Transformers has gotten to one of their biggest bads before the MCU introduced Galactus. Marvel needs a jolt right now of something. Hoping a great version of Galactus is done pretty soon.