Just saw Transformers: Dark of the moon IMAX 3D
**disclaimer, I did not see any material related to the movie before watching, and found the experience to be far greater, so watch the trailer at your own risk, the comments have tons of spoilers, review has the absolute minimum of spolers**
This movie was one epic thrillride. I loved the first one, but found Transformers 2 to be pretty dissapointing. Sure it had some good action sequences and the VFX were nice, but overall it was just very very messy; thankfully Dark of the Moon is more like the first one, heck because it had even less goofs than the first movie it's just plain better.
First of, Megan Fox being booted out of the cast was a good decision. The new girl, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, is not only a better actress (which granted isn't that big of a feat), but is also simply hotter; overall her presence on screen was just better than fox's was.
The story was much better than the one that was hardly present in that mess of a second movie, giving ample screentime to humans and individual bots alike and coupled with proper pacing this ~155 minute movie didn't feel like a drag at all.
I especially liked the inclusion of the historical apollo mission and JFK. Without spoiling too much, the only thing that bugged me about the story was how....gullible huminaty supposedly was....you stand your ground and fight goddamit! >_<
There was also a bunch of comedic moments, one with sam kicking the engine of his car, which was so damn funny for some reason, and a bunch more with people I didn't even expect to be in Transformer 3.
Now ofcourse the big selling point of Michael b.... I mean the Transformers franchise are the awesome action sequences and great VFX; Dark of the Moon definitly did not dissapoint in this aspect.
The graphical fidelity was just insane, best I've seen so far. I really tried hard to find errors...but honestly there were none. In fact I was already blow away with the opening sequence on cybertron. Now that's how you start a fucking movie...
Until we generate truly photorealistic graphics, this is definitly as good as it gets. Big part of that is cause of how grand and epic the scale of the movie is; Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen's sequences are actually quite small ( aside from the first movie's highway sequence ofcourse D: ). This time around it feels massive....it feels like how a war between giant ass robots should be.
Also the 3D effects were good, but where Thor might've been too strong with them, here they seemed like they could've been a bit stronger. But they did use the layering type of 3D I love..so yeah.
The audio didn't dissapoint at all either, it was more inline with Transformers, but better, not just loud like Revenge of the Fallen.
As for character specific stuff: Soundwave, Shockwave, Sideswipe and Sentinel (hey look at that, 4 S's ;P) were badass as hell! Too bad out of the 4 only Sentinel had some major screentime.
This time around I felt there weren't any annoying bots, like the ghetto twins in Fallen, so that's good..right?
Overall great audio, good pacing, superb AFX/VFX and a good story, bots and ppl alike die and it ends without any melodramatic bullshit, like it should..cause in the end this is an action movie where you just want to see lots of action accompanied by lots of explosions ;].
Highly recommended, blu-ray day 1 purchase! Go check this shit out! ;D