Heaven help us! What hath the great God of massive epics wrought? Two & a half hours of deafening, pointless waste, augmented by Steve Jablonsky's non-stop, ear-shattering music that seems composed by John Williams on a high, and the most laboriously created mélange of morphing robots - thousands of them, in all sizes from insect to mammoth - doing mainly nothing but fight, fight, fight.
Shia LaBeouf is back again, still trying to grow up with ditzy parents, still cooperating with friendly robots who are secretly keeping the world safe from the nasty robots that hover about in outer space, while ckompeting with a bumbling military which is more in the way than helping out. He also has to juggle his love interests, try to get a college education while he rooms with other frosh who stay active by illicitly performing dangerous things with astounding equipment in their suite - all developed within their first days at the university.
Things warm up when a whole passle of robots - the good, the bad & the stupid - occupy the rest of the film's time - noisily, confusingly, rapidly morphing & battling - from one part of the world to another. Finally, noisily, confusingly, rapidly, they wind up in Petra (for some great shots of that beautiful ruin) and then at the pyramids (with at least one robot chewing away at the top of one). Through all this, we're not expected to think, just look & listen - and that's alternating maddening & boring after the first 20-minutes.
In case you become as confused reading this as I was watching the jumble of action on the screen, I should hasten to tell you that the point of the film is, I think, to save the world and even the sun from total destruction. Much of the action supporting that plot is more of the same from out of the past. But sillier. Saturday morning cartoons are literary gems by comparison.
It also doesn't take much effort to recognize that this agonizing, unendurable opus is more the product of the massive computer generating teams; the live action is neither interesting, original nor exceptional.
The film is also a series of episodes which begin, go into wild action, then are dropped & forgotten. A library is destroyed, then forgotten. Ships go down, then forgotten. There are several near-death situations, just dropped as the battle sequences roll on and on and on and on.
One can only roll eyes and consider with wonder for the months of set building, design & creation of so many destructions that went into the making of the awful flick.
This is not a movie in the traditional sense; it's an experiment in computer generated moments, developed from expensively mounted set after set (including some scenes on the ocean that seem to have been lifted from that other Michael Bay disaster "Pearl Harbor."
Bay directs as if he's on some kind of illicit drug, along with composer Jablonsky, writers of this kid-oriented Saturday morning-type stuff, Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman - and everyone else responsible for this ear-shattering eyesore mayhem.
Anything good to say about the film? The silence once the final credits were over was wonderful, and the ringing in the ears vanished after only a day and a half.