What Went Wrong with Transformers 3

Like all the other teenagers who thrive on theatrical explosions, my friends and I dutifully went to the midnight premier of Transformers 3. We were expecting a plotless action movie filled with bad acting and lots of robots... and we were surprised. The first half of the movie exceeded all of our expectations—the movie had a plot! It had British accents! It even had a sequence of events that made sense! And the number of lines the Victoria's Secret model/actress had to memorize was smaller than her cup size! (And, arguably, her IQ.) But then the movie blew up in our faces, and when we left the theater at three in the morning we were confused beyond reason... and here's why:

SPOILER ALERT. THERE WILL BE, UH, SPOILERS.

• It was waaaay too long. By the time I left my seat, my legs were cramped, my eyes ached, and I really had to use the bathroom. There were several times when I shut my eyes and tried to fall asleep. The final battle scene dragged on for at least 4 hours, and almost no plot progression happened during that time. Long movies are fine, but something has to happen besides explosions. By the time the movie ended, I'd forgotten the conflict behind the whole thing.
• Shia LaBeouf's character hasn't changed at all. When we first met Shia LaBeouf's character two movies ago, he was a whiny, under-appreciated guy who wants to be a hero. And that's exactly what he still is. Except I think there was more whining in this movie.
• Carly's white sweater never got dirty. For almost half of the movie, Carly (AKA Ms. Victoria's Secret), wore a stunningly white sweater. She ran around falling buildings, got tossed around by robots, slid down a glass wall, and almost exploded... and the sweater was still white. Everyone else got dirty. Carly's face even got dirty. Yet the sweater stayed in pristine condition. Anyone else find that odd?
• The action sequences made no sense. I realize that Transformers 3 is an action movie, and that most action movies don't require a lot of plot or understandable events. But usually the string of explosion scenes will at least fit together in some way—and Transformers 3's didn't. People and robots kept popping in and out of different (unconnected) parts of the battle with no explanation as to how they knew they needed to go there... it was confusing.
• Carly should've died. The model got one big scene in the entire movie: she yelled at Megatron (the big villain dude) about how he was being turned into an errand boy. Well, that's fine, at least she got to do something. Except she was antagonizing an evil, murderous robot who was roughly ten times her size. Who almost squashed her. But for some reason didn't. Why?
• The robots didn't really need humans... did they? The robots (both good guys and bad) kept saying their race was advanced far beyond human capacity. They were all geniuses. They built a utopia. And then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided they needed humans to be their slaves. Even though they had never needed humans for anything before.
• And then they killed all the humans. If the evil robots were taking over Earth in order to enslave the human race, it really makes no sense for them to vaporize every potential slave that crossed their path. But that's what they did-- the moment the Decipticons invaded Chicago, they began slaughtering every human they could find... except for Carly. Again, why isn't she dead? Which brings me to my final point...
• No one ever died. Okay, fine, a bunch of extras died. And the villains died. And Megatron was finally turned into spare parts. But none of the important good guys died. Not even all the robots, who were supposedly blown up. Not Shia LaBeouf, because Bumblebee kept knowing he needed to save him through some mystical psychic man-robot connection. And not Carly, because you can't kill an actress with perfect boobs.

What did you think of Transformers 3?

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