Like most Michael Bay movies, it was violently fun. He knows how to send the audience on a ride past exploding buildings and flipping cars. I'd probably watch it again if it ever came on TV, just for the interest in the special effects. It also sounded like it had a pretty good soundtrack (I'm still waiting for it to be released, though).

But there were a few things that bothered me throughout the movie:

1. It was really, REALLY preachy. Sacrifice! Sacrifice! SACRIFICE! I can't begin to count the number of times that the idea of sacrifice was pitched to the moviegoers. Sacrifice and honor, victory through sacrifice, sacrificing yourself for the greater good, yada yada. The film was like some sort of military recruiting tool (not surprisingly, there was an advertisement for The Marines before the movie started). For example, the main character (a high school kid) is told at one point that he's "a soldier now" by a marine who is sending him on what seems to be a suicide mission.

2. The actual content isn't all that good. The dialogue gets really corny at times, worthy of a bad made-for-TV movie, and there are a lot of gaping holes in the plot and in the logic. (Minor Spoiler Alert!) For example, why are newly-created robots (created by this life-giving cube thing) hostile to humans and why are they armed to the teeth with missiles and guns? In the end, the main character is sent on a suicide mission, but there's really no point to what his mission actually is if he were to succeed. And somehow, a high-school-aged hacker is somehow able to decode alien audio files on his home PC in a matter of a few minutes.

It felt like the movie maker had come up with battles in his head and then tried to figure out the quickest way to get from one battle to the next, regardless of how much sense it made.

3. There's a decent amount of sexism and some racism in there, although it probably won't be noticeable to most people. I would gather that most people would only remember the main actress talking about her only attraction being to big muscles, and maybe several Marines ordering another Marine to speak "English only" whenever he would start chattering in heated Spanish like Ricky Ricardo.

4. Most movies have advertisements built into the scenes nowadays. This movie went quite a bit overboard on ads. As you can imagine, car companies were well-represented (Chevy, GMC, Porsche, etc...), and there were scenes where the camera would zoom in on the white "Panasonic" lettering running across a flash card. What cell phone companies were "better" was a topic of discussion at one point, and a Nokie phone gets turned into a small robot while another character talks about how Nokia is based in Finland. And of course, the biggest advertiser in the movie was the Marines.

Overall, it seemed more like a movie designed by the Marines to help recruit fresh-out-of-high-school guys. Entertaining, yes, but it wouldn't be an effective recruiting tool if it weren't.


Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Action Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Plot