Saw it, thought it was pretty good. Way less immature humor and the individual Autobots each get quite a number of lines, but overall it felt like two movies crammed together:
- It starts of with
someone wiping out the dinosaurs, but they don't really do much with this plotline. It's sort of hinted at here and there, but it's all very incidental.
- The main human is a struggling inventor. He "reboots" Optimus and a flying camera, but this aspect gets dropped about halfway thru.
- There's a short bit about sparks and souls, and how Galvatron doesn't have one, but that's also dropped.
- Humanity has completely turned on the Transformers as a whole, but apart from getting the authorities on Optimus and setting up the human villain's motives it's left unexplored. Lockdown straight-up walks out in the open near a baseball game but nobody reacts more than "look!"
- Some humans are hunting down Autobots (claiming their Decepticons, wait what?) and melting them down for parts to make their own transformers. OK.
- And they're working with Lockdown, who's got is own motives -- and giant ship and minions and goodness knows what else. Fine.
- Meanwhile Megatron is manipulating the humans into remaking his army. Alright, very Animated-esque.
- ...but what about the Dinobots they so heavily advertised?
- Also there is something about mining "transformium", and a bomb that'd turn an entire city into that stuff, but did we really need
another threat?
- Stinger is set up to be a evil Bumblebee of sorts, but it's impossible to distinguish him from the millions of other generics so when Bee finally kills him I'm left thinking "wait didn't they kill like 5 or him already?"
- "Real" Transformers got their own creators, but we never see them (was that mostly organic hand that killed the dinosaurs them?) -- which is just as well since this film already has a crap ton of plot points
- Lockdown and Optimus mention something about knights, but I can't care because I'm still waiting for the goddamn Dinobots
- ... who finally appear with what feels like 10 minutes to go but they don't say anything, do little besides provide a ride for the Autobots, and there's very little explanation as to why they're even dinosaurs. They almost seem like afterthoughts.
- Speaking of which, what was up with the frozen dinos? Were they the Dinobots or just victims of the carpet bombing (in the Arctic?)
- And what even happened to Lockdown's ship?
But as I said, I thought it was pretty good.
"I thought he'd be a giant car."
, although not enough Dinobot time or characterization. The human character development was better, and not as many sidekicks or comic reliefs. Kelsey Grammer was a good human villain, and I'm not sure what purpose Li Bingbing served. Wahlberg was a much better protagonist, and his character much less self-concerned than LaBeouf's; but that's more on the writers than the actors.
