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.

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