Saw this movie with my girlfriend, pretty much the same thoughts as many on this messageboard. She liked it okay - but the garbled mess of fight scenes and the movie's length gave her a headache, which is understandable, I felt the same way.
I loved the movie though, with all considering, I honestly thought it was a massive undertaking making a movie with this type of premise. Still there were things that gave me a headache very fast.
Things that kinda either drove me nuts or dissapointed me:
- Too close of shots with the Autobots.
- Transforming "sound" of shape shifting happened way too much.
- Was a half hour too long, as others have noted the first 1/3 of the film seemed to be perfect, but the last end seemed to drag on -- especially parts of the "Sector 7" portion. Should have been edited out or something.... just ridiculous.
- Michael Bay, which a lot of people hate for some reason, made the fight between Optimus Prime & Megatron end out of no where. How did Sam (Shia Lebeauf) know that sticking the cube into Megatron it would kill him? Just seemed out of no where.
- Was an absolute General Motors commercial, would've been nice for other car manufacturer's to license their cars for the film.
- Fights were really difficult to understand exactly what was going on in the end, just really seemed like a garbled mess.
-Relationships with characters like the blonde girl and black hacker guy seemed to just end out of no where. Their relationship with Jon Voight just seemed to go out the window.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED .... I really had a lot riding on this movie; but considered I knew 90% would be CGI or special effects, I thought it looked "as real as possible" at least on the theater screen. I'm sure that will change when it's released on DVD or HD or whatever and you can tell better its effects. There's some problems sure, Hugo Weaving's voice for Prime gave me chills.
Best summer movie I've seen in years. Partly because of the cool factor of things changing, Weaving's great voice for his part, or the chase scenes between the Ford Mustang and the Camaro. Made me go nuts hearing the rumbling of those V8s.