“Transformers: Dark Of The Moon”

Transformers: Dark Of The Moon hit theatres last night with Derek & I first in line at the Carmike Cinemas on Horsetooth for the very first showing (Complete with our giddy faces on).

I'll sum it up like this; if you liked the first two Transformers movies, you'll probably love it. If you didn't like the first two, you probably won't see this one, and if you do you won't like it any better than the others.

Now that I’ve seen it, I can tell you that TF3 lives up to most of the hype and expectations. There are more robots, more epic battles, more of a plot, and the film is more visually stunning! In fact this is one of the few movies I would recommend seeing in 3D. The technology was used to create brilliant foreground, midground, and background depth and really makes the robots “pop” on screen. 3D was used to make the movie look amazing (Similar to how “Avatar” used it).

The story line was pretty good. (Michael Bay actually used a few things from the original cartoon storylines!) There w

ere some unexpected plot twists, and a lot of humor mixed in. Best of all, there was no mention o

f 'Skids' or 'Mudflap', the two robots that drew all kinds of racially charged attention in TF2.

And Optimus Prime finally has his signature trailer!

I have a feeling you would be lost if you saw the latest movie without seeing the first two, but that also means Bay didn’t have to waste half the movie explaining all of the back story, it’s basically assumed that you already have a grasp of what is happening and who the main characters are, which makes for a much more fast-paced and enjoyable movie.

The original Transformers fan in me wants to slap Bay across the face about 37 times for changes he decided to make to parts of the Transformers universe, (Optimus’ mouth, Soundwave being a luxury car, Laserbeak talking, Shockwave not being on Cybertron, the unexplained giant robotic snake he was riding, the Matrix looking like a dagger, etc…) but the movie-goer in me was still giddy about this one.

Yes, fan boys will rip this movie apart. Yes, critic’s looking for novel-like plots and Oscar-winning thespian performances will probably write this off as flashy, thoughtless trash, but that’s not what a ‘summer blockbuster’ is about. It’s about entertaining, and I think TF3 delivers perfectly in that aspect.

One thing I thought was odd is that there were really only two female characters in the entire movie. One was bitchy, angry and uptight; the other was a blonde bombshell who was nothing more than eye candy. The latter, played by Victoria’s Secret’s model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley had more than her share of screen time. Nearly every time she showed up she had a slow-motion, zoomed-in shot of her curves and crevices.

Don’t get me wrong, the guy in me still enjoyed it to a point, but it was so overboard, so over the top, that it felt like the camera people were so distracted that they couldn’t film those scenes correctly. I’m serious; they stood out like sore thumbs. There had to be at least 8 gratuitous shots in the first half hour, not one of which had anything to do with the movie. (And I think they injected way too much collagen in her lips, she just looked inhuman at times.)

Overall, I liked "Transformers: Dark Of The Moon." I’m a TF fan and this sure stuck to the guns that earned so many millions for the franchise so far.

Let me know what you think. Thumbs-up, or thumbs-down?

Need to find show-times?