For some unknown reason, Allison’s brother wanted to give Michael Bay $12 and waste 2 hours and 37 minutes of his life. I ended up having to go with them to watch it.


Now, when I went into the first Transformers movies I was thinking to myself “Wow, it’s like live action Gundam except with a HUGE budget!”. I expected awesome mecha battles with cool weapons. Instead what I got was a boring, teen angst story where most of the battle scenes involved humans running around on the floor like ants trying to attack the weak spot for maximum damage. Meanwhile, the shaky, irritating camera made viewing a headache. The only way it could have been better is if it pulled a Gundam Seed Destiny and repeated 50% of the explosion scenes to save animation costs.

The best scene of the first movie was a very unimportant, glossed over part. Optimus Prime engages some random Decepticon (I think he was a construction truck or something), while driving on the road. He jumps him, whips out a blade on his wrist, and just wrecks him. The camera focuses solely on this fight without jumping around all over the place. You get to actually see the carnage of mecha vs mecha, down to the fine details of him delivering the killing blow. This is what I came to see.

No prisoners. No mercy.

Now, to get back to the point. I actually thought Transformers 3 was OK. Michael Bay is finally figuring out how to do mecha battles. I can’t help but think that in between Transformers 2 and 3, he must have watched a ton of anime for inspiration. You could copy paste Sentinel Prime into some Gundam Series and I wouldn’t know the difference. They started using melee weapons instead of dicking around shooting volleys of bullets at each other. Heat blades, heat axes and shields were all present. I almost expected them to whip out (pun intended) the Epyon heat whip. Optimus Prime literally kills a guy as he begs for mercy, grabbing his innards and tearing them out (Neon Genesis Evangelion style). You can feel the tension in the cables as he rips them out and mecha “blood” spills everywhere. I actually enjoyed watching the mecha vs mecha scenes in this movie, and there were a lot of them scattered throughout to keep me somewhat interested.

Now of course, the storyline was terrible, the characters are unlikeable, the jokes are unfunny, and someone seems to still think watching humans running around on the floor fighting giant mecha is entertaining to watch. I fell asleep in the middle part because it was so boring. Release a Transformers movie with no humans and I will be there opening night to watch.