This movie was better than it had any right to be albeit still pales to the 1st film or Bumblebee.
I keep telling people it's the polar opposite of the Bay movies -- Bay was famous for his action spectacle often leaving script as a secondary and a great weakness, but here the script is really the most compelling part with the action and directing being pretty underwhelming. I quite enjoyed all the relationships displayed here. I like they avoided the otherwise obligatory romance between the two leads, thought that was pretty cool. All in all, pretty good. I think it benefits from the shittiness of the franchise because if we didn't have those to compare I might not be so nice to it considering it really is just mediocre at best.
Anthony Ramos was probably the best human character the franchise has had to date though. Obviously was victimized by goofy lines but he definitely did what he could. I actually liked this one. All in all, it was fine, and I think it's likely the end of the Bay Transformers era. I don't think it'll make much money at all with Across the Spider-verse and The Flash/Elemental flanking it. And I suspect the animated TMNT movie will do gangbusters and then the animated Transformers film slated for next year will garner an audience and they'll realize they'd been approaching it from the wrong angle this whole time.
Most frustrating thing for me is that I think this movie proves that live action Transformers has real potential. Optimus Prime has like a full on arc, and it's actually really beautiful, and I realized that the humans were just taking up space. Prime's arc here proves that they don't need the humans, we can buy these aliens as real characters. They're not just pawns for action setpieces. But now it's going to be over so it's not going to matter anyways. I'm really excited for the animated film though given the state of that medium.
Anything is possible.
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