TF3 was Michael Bay sulking about how much you hated TF2. Silent Treatment Optimus is Bay telling you how much you've hurt his feelings.
I found it to be completely schizophrenic, lacking overall coherence and often lacking coherence within individual scenes. Characters would just disappear for a while, while others would randomly go up and down buildings. My friend and I speculated that Bay got various actors completely drunk and then when they woke up in the morning they discovered they'd signed a contract saying they'd be in the movie. In blood. For lots of money.
The attraction of Optimus Prime has always been that he's been, well, a noble truck. And there in the last act of the movie and he isn't saying "We've got to go in there and give our all to save this world and the innocent people who we've brought our war to" to "We're going to kill them all." Entertaining, but a complete change of the character and once again Bay giving you the finger for hurting his feelings, you nasty people on the internet.
I still find the idea of multiple Primes simultaneously existing to be hilarious.
The new girl bugged the hell out of me. The last girl could at least hotwire a car. The new one was supposed to look like a car, apparently.
Shockwave was tragically underutilised and there was some kind of random goblin Decepticon in a couple of scenes. What was that about?
The action scenes still look like they smashed a whole lot of cars together into a ball and rolled it down a hill and filmed that. More than once, I found myself blinking and thinking, "Wait, has he been there the whole scene?"
I was actually okay with the concept of The Fallen, because I know where he got it from. The Fallen is taken straight from the second War Within miniseries, in which one of the original thirteen Transformers pops up and just about destroys everything. There was a character named Liege Maximo glimpsed at the end of the second run of the Marvel US comic as well, who was the original Decepticon, but that series got cancelled before the idea could be developed. Although frankly that series wasn't going in a good direction. So yeah, I'm good with the concept of The Fallen, but Bay crapped all over it.
You can say it's just popcorn fare, but you can make a summer blockbuster like The Dark Knight or Terminator 2. You can do something decent with this material. Michael Bay is to the Transformers franchise what Joel Schumacher was to the Batman franchise. He's demonstrated the technology exists to put a Transformers movie on the screen, but I'll wait ten years for someone to come along and do something decent with it.
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I just started playing War for Cybertron again. I didn't quite get to the end of the Decepticon campaign first time around and then stopped playing it so long I thought it best to start over. I'm still not very good at it, but it's enjoyable. I don't suppose there's a trailer for the new series out there somewhere, is there?