Shia LaBeouf's actual reactions to watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon
mirror my own reactions to watching Transformers: The Last Knight.
Before I even begin, I just want to remind everyone that I'm not blindly hating on this movie because it's the hip thing to do these days. I actually genuinely liked and defended the previous film, Age of Extinction, a movie that I felt was unfairly hated on, as it both addressed and corrected upon just about every single gripe that people had made about the first three movies, and yet it was somehow lambasted as the worst in the series regardless, which still annoys me even now. Outside of Dark of the Moon though, I've otherwise liked all of these movies to date. But oh boy, this one's a different beast entirely. In fact, all those gripes I had alluded to just now? Yeah, by the end of this, you'll be left wishing the movie was as remarkably tame as those films apparently were in hindsight, now that this movie exists to show us just how bad things could actually get.
So I recently watched the latest Transformers movie, The Last Knight, and I really don't even wanna talk about it. But after watching the movie, I had a bit of a notable meltdown over it on twitter, and was as such requested to please review the movie. And I have this thing where if someone actually requests a review from me, I feel determined to provide one. So here I am, attempting to relive this movie that has left my thoughts a lot more of a scrambled mess than is normal from me.
You see, normally after watching a movie, I can recall moments of it quite vividly, and describe them in great detail when it comes time to review them. But here, I was so disinterested by what I was watching and really not at all invested that most of the movie is honestly a blur to me at this point. I mean, I know that they did the big action thing, and they beat the big bad, and all that stuff. But truth be told, I'd be lying if I said that I could tell you precisely how the big bad was beat, because honestly, I was barely even paying attention by that point and just waiting for the movie to finally end so that I could just go already. Because you see, this movie reached a point relatively early on where I just couldn't even believe what I was watching, so much so that I actually wanted to leave the theater. After all, it wasn't like I was going to miss anything. (Which I didn't.) But see, theaters these days have employed this thing known as the recliner seat, and every single person in the row I was sitting on (of which I was sitting dead center), had their recliner up. So I suppose I felt a bit too self-conscious to stand up and request that each and every single person on my row put their seat down so that I could get up and leave, and as such, I felt a bit trapped in my screening. Consider this yet another reason among the many I've already exasperated as to why I absolutely can not stand the insistency for modern theaters to shift towards this format of theater going.
So anyways, like I said, this movie was a mess, and my thoughts on it are similarly messy, so I'm just going to discuss things as they come to me. And to start off, let's talk about how Optimus Prime was supposed to be the villain, only he was really only the villain for about five minutes of the movie, if that, despite the fact that his heel turn was supposed to be the entire selling point of the movie. The thing is though, when his scene came on, I was so happy, because that meant that the movie was finally almost over, right? Except, it wasn't. Because as soon as he turns good again, the true villains swoop in and steal the maguffin, and it's up to our heroes to chase after them and engage in yet another 30-45 minutes of this god forsaken movie that just wouldn't ever end. Oh my god, I could literally feel my heart sink in that moment when that realization struck me.
But let's talk about the aspect ratio of this thing, which is something that I have yet to see anyone else bring up in any other reviews that I've read and watched, which really just dumbfounds me. But to give you an example of what I'm talking about, you know when you go to see a movie in IMAX, but the whole movie wasn't actually filmed in IMAX, so there are only certain scenes where the image stretches to a true IMAX size, and the rest of the time there's black bars on the top and bottom of the screen? And you know how, when the image stretches, it typically stays that way all throughout the scene, and only resumes to its normal aspect ratio after the scene has ended? Yeah, well here, the movie keeps jumping aspect ratios back and forth all throughout. But, it's not just from scene to scene. No, the movie will do this from cut to cut. That's right, that means that in the middle of an action sequence, we'll be on, say, a cut of someone throwing a punch, which might be wide. Then, when we cut to the next shot of that punch connecting, it'll be the normal aspect ratio, only to go wide again in the following cut. And this is a Michael Bay film, which means there's lots of quick cuts throughout. Meaning that there are black bars just hopping in and out of the frame all throughout the whole movie, and this is just maddening to watch. Hell, it wasn't even just action scenes, even scenes with people standing around talking were edited together in this manner. And afterwards, I wondered if this was just my screening, seeing as how I hadn't seen anyone else bring this up. But then some of the video reviews I watched showed footage from the movie in their reviews, and I could see this rapid fire ADD aspect ratio shenanigans in action in the footage provided! So it wasn't just my screening! The movie was actually filmed and cut together this way! How? How did this happen?
(Oh, and by the way, I didn't see this is IMAX. That's the regular version that's cut this way!)
And as to the writing, good lord. I have seen some stupid, immature idiocy in my day. Hell, that's one of the biggest complaints most people have about all the previous movies in this series, is that they feel like they're written for immature twelve year old, by immature twelve year olds. But my lord, take every single immature moment from all the past films, and just multiply the sheer stupidity by about a million, and you're still not close to how ridiculous this movie gets. Like, there's a whole aspect where the movie canonizes King Arthur and Merlin and all of those characters into this series, and they spend, I shit you not, at least a good half hour or longer just sitting down and explaining how this all ties together in a scene of exposition that just went on and on and on to a mind numbing degree. And the longer it went on, the dumber it all sounded, and the dumber I felt for sitting there watching this garbage. And the thing that made it even worse is that as the characters are explaining all of this dumb stupid shit, they'll just burst into random fits where they try to spout out some lingo that some writer in their thirties probably thought sounded like something some fly, hip teenager would say these days. Only, this dialogue is coming out of the mouths of the likes of Anthony Hopkins, and it's just, for lack of a more appropriate word, bizarre. Relentlessly so. But it's not just him, it's the whole entire cast who talks and acts this way. Just spouting out belligerent nonsense at random, and saying things so immature it would make even the worst line out of any of the prior movies blush. And all the while, I was left asking myself, what in the hell am I even watching?!
Speaking on King Arthur, I guess that technically makes this the second Arthur movie of the year, and by far the worse of the two. But what's even more bizarre than that revelation is the fact that there's actually a scene in this movie that feels like it's edited almost in homage to Guy Ritchie's distinct editing style that was on display in the other film. It's replete with hopping back and forth through time as the scene plays out, with overlying exposition and even text bursting onto the screen to introduce a whole slew of new characters. Thing is though, this is the only scene in the entire series that's edited this way, and it's all to introduce a bunch of character who are immediately killed off in the very next scene anyways, meaning that it exists solely to waste even more of our time than we already have, and nothing more. But it was just weird seeing a scene like that here, and I don't know if it was done on purpose as a nod to the Ritchie film or not, or if that's even possible, given how close the two were to each other's release. But it was a scene that just stood out as a huge question mark to me. See, this editing worked for me in the Guy Ritchie film, but it was also a consistent style that they went with throughout that whole movie. But what worked in that movie totally doesn't in this one, and it's just yet another instance of me asking, what the hell were they thinking?!
Now, I know that a lot of what I've described here may well sound like it can also apply to some of the other movies with just how ridiculous and stupid it can all get. But I'm not sure that words can properly do justice to the sheer depths that this movie devolves to. Like, I'm not even scraping the surface with just how much of an insufferable experience this was to sit through, and just how badly I didn't want to be there. You're just gonna have to trust me when I say that as bad as I may make this movie out to be here, it's actually far worse, and there's so much more that I can discuss that I just really have no desire to even get into here.
Honestly, I've never so badly wanted to walk out of a movie in my life. I reached a point where I just didn't care anymore. Like, at all. A moment where I could feel my life being wasted away on this garbage, where I was literally sitting there feeling like I was just too old for this shit anymore. And it wasn't just me. When the movie was finally wrapping up (we got our cue because Optimus Prime was doing the same voice over that he does at the end of all of these movies), the people in front of me instantly stood up, only to find themselves in the same precarious situation I had found myself in, as they suddenly realized they were trapped by the recliners all around them. But they were clearly ready to leave, and as I was storming out of the theater, I could overhear others walking out discussing how Michael Bay is the worst director out there. And that last part is kind of a shame, because I mean, Michael Bay has proven capable of making a good movie. Hell, he's even made a handful of great ones. But my lord, you'd never know that watching shit like this. This was just some of the most incompetent filmmaking I've ever seen out of anyone.
I would say the one saving grace would be how, after the movie ended, some idiot in our audience tried to applaud this thing, and I was so worried that I was about to have to witness another ovation for one of these films. I mean, after Dark of the Moon, our audience applauded, which to this day astounds me (though to be fair, as much shit as I talked about that movie, after enduring what I did with The Last Knight, I owe that one a huge apology). But thankfully, on this occasion, no one else joined in, so at least there was that.
As I was walking out, there was a scene during the credits which I guess was supposed to tease the next one. But I just could not give a shit less, I was too busy finally leaving the theater to care anymore. Hell, make another one, I don't care. But after this hot mess? Yeah, you bet your ass I'm tapping out on this series. At least so long as Michael Bay remains at the helm, I've officially seen as much as I desire to see out of this franchise. But usually after seeing a movie that's this bad, my reaction is to consider it to be one of, if not the worst movie of the year. After this movie had wrapped though, it was honestly the first time in my life where I had felt that I may very well have actually seen the worst movie I've ever sat through in my entire life. Like, I have seen my fair share of bad movies, but I didn't know they could get this bad, and I'm still in a state of disbelief as to what I had seen. If ever there existed a movie where watching it was apt to give the recipient a thousand yard stare, this is that movie.
