Transformers 3: I Was Supposed to Hire a Writer........At Least the Special Effects Were Good

As the clock struck 12:01 late last night, or I guess technically early this morning, I settled into the stadium seating of my local movie theater as the third installment of the Transformers series began. The film opened in true Michael Bay, the film's CGI wielding director, fashion. A flashback showed Autobots fighting Decepticons on their home planet. Alien ships  weave their way through a planet that seems to be made entirely of metal. Bay asserts his ability to brilliantly use CGI within the first second of the film and continues until the very last second. Cities  robots, battles, buildings and even past presidents are created by computers throughout the film. The battles and special effects, as they were in the past two movies, were brilliant and wholly engaging. It is worth the ten dollar 3D charge to see Soundwave's pet Decepticon wrap itself around huge Windy City skyscraper or to see Optimus Prime swoop through a Chicago city on his flight deck and decimate a group of ten Decepticons. While visually, and action-wise, the film was amazing, it had some gaping holes. The first hole was left when previous eye candy Megan Fox was removed from the project. Though she is quite nice to look at, Megan Fox acting-style, a term I use quite loosely, was a giant thorn in the franchise's side. Instead of taking the opportunity to right a horrible wrong, whomever did the casting for Transformers Dark of the Moon decided to make things worse. Megan Fox was replaced by model (notice I am purposely not using the term actress) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who basically spent the entire film posing in white dresses. Beyond that, the acting was over-overwhelmingly mediocre with nothing complain too much about but also nothing to praise. A slough of cameo's walked across the screen, including Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand and John Malkovich. While these cameos were amusing, they didn't do much to fix the problems in the film. The writing, directing and story was choppy and rough. The script itself needed to cleaned up and polished because as it was, it was very difficult to make sense of the story. There were many scenes that were not necessary for the story and even more that needed more clarification. The entire movie, until the end fight scene, seemed rushed and contributed to the plot confusion. When the slightly raunchy humor of the first film went over well with the audience, the writer's tried to add to that in this third installment but they went too far and most of the humor was juvenile and over the top. Though these problems to exist in the film, I still give the film a 6 out of 10 and recommend seeing it in the theaters, just for the spectacular CGI, special effects and battle sequences.