Tonight was Date Night plus Family Movie Night. This doesn't normally happen this way, but Transformers 3 was out and we all wanted to see it. Grandma was going to take the boys but a late plan change meant that we dropped the three kids off as normal and ate by ourselves, then picked the boys up for the movie, then dropped them back off again for the night. Confused yet?
About the movie. As I recall, 2 sucked. So badly that the head writers *apologized* for it. I think even Michael Bay (action auteur and Kyle's nemesis) apologized for it. And 3's trailers seemed good but inconclusive.
Go. See. It.
It's 2 and a half hours long, and after it ends, you'll feel like you've been riding thrill rides for that long. It's well-paced, often funny, and full of great action set-pieces that (with one exception) don't frustrate.
Also, Buzz Aldrin.
Buzz Freaking Aldrin.
You may not know this, but this Mithran is old enough to remember the end of the Space Race as recent history, and also to have lived through every moment of the Shuttle program, including the Enterprise. I even have an ancient NASA Shuttle t-shirt from waaay back. Elder has it now ^^
I don't normally go in for the "real men" thing, but the astronauts were indeed /real/ men (and later women) who braved the unknown, dodgy tech, and physics to go someplace I'd nearly kill to see firsthand. T3 opens with an awful lot of actual (and some doctored) space program footage and Kennedy/Nixon bits too. Later, Buzz himself makes a great cameo. I had to resist the urge to cheer!
But that was just the first bit of awesome. I won't spoil Number 2 outright. But he gets a "double" cameo and one of the best lines in the whole thing.
Also, Patrick Dempsey. As a high-powered playboy exec who just happens to be a pro racer. In real life, Mr. Dempsey has been racing in the Rolex GT series for three or four years now, in an RX-8. Yup. *My* car.
Also also, Datsun 510 aka Bluebird. I wouldn't mind having one of these in RHD trim if I couldn't collect an AE86 Trueno...
All four of us really really enjoyed it. Heck, Soundwave's in it, although they changed his voice too much for my liking, and Ravage doesn't appear. I'm pretty sure his Ravage is where I got my last name from.
Also, I spent most of the movie thinking of Shockwave's "worm-bot" as a hydra when I should have just called it a shai-hulud. But more cybery.
Oh, that one disappointing set-piece? The building that shai-hulud bends in half. When will movies stop showing ordinary humans stopping a free-fall by grabbing onto something one-handed, or catching another falling human, without including dislocated shoulders?
Yes, I'm nitpicking human abilities in a movie quite literally crawling with intelligent, shapeshifting robots.
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