Review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) by Dragon029 — 30 Jun 2011

Definitely the best of the 3 Transformer movies in my opinion, with moments that created genuine laughs throughout the cinema. Additionally, like any final movie in a trilogy, I walked in knowing that there was going to be tragedy on the autobot side.

This, along with plenty of close calls made things somewhat unpredictable - yes it was obvious who would win and yes we saw Megatron's attack on Sentinel Prime coming from a hundred miles away, but there were other twists I didn't see coming - Sentinel's betrayal for example came pretty much out of the blue for me, particularly due to the amount of hype that was placed on him being the prior great leader of the Autobots.

What really egged me were the scientific details, like how Earth wasn't ripped apart by Cybertron's gravity (keeping in mind that at one point the lightbridge stops aiding its arrival, meaning that any anti-gravity fields or whatever should have been off long enough to end the story there and then). Or how the guns of the Autobots appeared majorly inferior to human weapons, despite having a larger calibre, etc. Or how a wire holding 80kg of flesh being thrown around, while rubbing against angular, super-hardened alien metal was able to be cut by a small steel knife. Or how Sam was able to walk away from a crash-landing of a large alien aircraft while being unrestrained and hanging onto the outer hull (which flips multiple times after striking the ground).

Still, I guess it's just as believable as giant humanoid robots that transform into human vehicles of completely different material (metal alloys =/= leather seats) upon having first scanned them for a couple of seconds.

Point taken, the movie isn't about realism obviously, but rather action and practical comedy, of which it delivers both. Some have mentioned that it had too much slow motion, but I would prefer that a hundred times over than having cameras and scene change every second while objects across the focal range whiz past, obscuring the action even more.