Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

I appreciated the fact that this film made Optimus Prime an actual character, and that it found a couple of interesting, believable ways to give the human characters a legitimate use in the story.

Aside from a few moments involving these things, I was bored senseless by this movie.

I struggle to comprehend how a script like this passes so many hands and makes it to production; it has some of the worst dialogue this side of Attack of the Clones.

Everything in this movie is told to us, rather than creatively shown. It's obnoxious, it's lazy, and it's stupid. It treats us, the audience, like we're stupid as it spoon feeds every piece of information to us like we're infants, even though the story is really simple and nothing original or complex happens once.

All this could be saved if the action were entertaining and investing. But it isn't, aside from a handful of stylish shots.

Say what you will about Michael Bay's movies. (They're bad.) But at least they had huge scale to them and the stakes were understood.

This is a bland blockbuster movie, through and through. The action never features any destruction or threat to human life. There isn't a practical, real thing happening on screen.

Artificial, boring, and derivative, with about 5-10 minutes worth of good material.

I thought Bumblebee was a bright spot, but it looks like the good streak has been cut short.