Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on July 2011

I chuckle at those who gush that this vapid, morally idiotic, unabashedly mindless mess is the “best Transformers movie yet!” There was a good one? It does have a marginally more cohesive plot than T2 (hardly difficult), starting with the intriguing idea that one of the Apollo missions was actually to check out an alien spacecraft that had crashed on the Moon. But this quickly degenerates into two and a half hours of noisy battles between giant talking robots (one of whom sounds a lot like Spock). Impossible to tell the good ‘bots from the bad, but who cares? Popcorn movies don’t have to be this empty.