I just got back from seeing it so I'm going to just spew whatever shit comes out of my head.
BE WARNED, SPOILERS AHEAD
Overall, I didn't hate the movie...it was pretty much what I expected. Bay didn't ruin the movie, but his dirty fingerprints are all over it, and his shit directing that every now and again just pops me out of the story, not something you want happening during a movie.
The first 1/3 of the movie was paced a lot better than the last 2/3. The story didn't seem as silly as it did when I read parts of the leaked script. At times Bay knows how to do some comedic stuff, like Bobby Bolivia introducing his mammy. Then later on in the movie in Qatar, he totally fucked up the fight scene with Scorponok with the Indian phone rep. It wasn't funny, it fucked up an otherwie cool fight scene and it wasn't really visually appealing either, it looked like it belonged in Napoleon Dynamite, not the biggest blockbuster action flick of the summer. Otherwise though, I was OK with this much of the movie. Sam getting his car it pushing along the love interest, saving his ass a couple times and the fight with Barricade...cool shit.
Now for the next 2/3 of the movie. After Prime and the rest of the autobots showed up everything seemed to be in a big hurry to go nowhere. They'd build momentum and then just slam you back into another storyline that's slow as fuck to build up. When they all showed up at Sam's house and sneak around...I could have done without all of the cutesy cliche garbage, but whatever, that didn't bother me all that much. Then in comes the sector 7 stuff...not too keen on the head guy being a dick to him being their buddy at the flick of a switch. The mustached dude should have been the face of the organization. Frenzy was essentially the Jar Jar of the movie, I could have done without his stupid schtick and cutesy voice.
When thing finally get going full speed on the last 1/3 of the movie I have mixed emotions. Going in I figured this would be where Michael Bay gets to shine. Not so much. The fight scene with Bonecrusher was a big letdown. Way too quick and he died way too easily. Starscream? He seemed like a total afterthought in the movie. He could be edited out and nobody would know the difference. I didn't even really realize that Barricade died in the fight with Bumblebee....or did he? There was the cop car in the chase scene before the Bonecrusher fight.
Into the final battle....this is where the robots designs and Michael Bay just totally dropped the ball IMO. He relied WAY too much on the shakey cam and had WAY too many fucking closeups. When they were fighting it was hard to make heads or tales of what the fuck you were looking at. You'd see them leap at one another and then alls you could see is what amounts to Andy Capp's wife beating the shit out of him in a cloud of fists and rolling pins. Another thing I didn't get was the seemingly totally random placement of the Transforming noise. Jazz getting ripped in half was pretty lame too. There was hardly any character development of the Autobots, you could really have given two shits about him. And then there was the total pissing on the "one shall stand, one shall fall" line. I don't mean to bring up the cartoon, for the most part I was able to totally disassociate myself from everything I had known and tried to immerse myself in the movie (bay speed bumps aside), and I'm not totally pissed at what they did with the story or the characters. But I'd like for anyone who's seen the movie to honestly tell me that any of the action in that movie even remotely compares to this scene from the original: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fB0_vJUc3o4 The emotion in that fight with prime vs. megatron shits on any of the fight scenes in this movie and that's why I'm sad that they tried to use the "one shall stand" line.
I was surprised however of Bay not douching it up too bad w/ the love story. He handled it ok and I didn't hate Megan Fox like I do most women by the end of his movies. As I said before, I also didn't hate what they did as far as the mythology goes. The scene with sam running through the city with the allspark and shit coming alive was kind of cool, the whole sector 7 storyline, while cliche, was all right. In the end, it was a decent flick, I was a little let down by the action scenes, the cinematography was beautiful, almost to a fault, which is why I think a lot of the action sequences were muddied. They tried too hard to look cool rather than to convey wtf was going on. Overall I give it a B-, easily the best Bay movie I've seen...which is kind of a back handed compliment
