'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' Reviews Are Coming In

Paramount

With Michael Bay and his Transformers: Dark of the Moon crew globe-trotting around the world -- they were in Moscow and parts of Europe last week, and tonight they hit the Big Apple -- word is starting to spill about the movie.

THR says: "The kick of the first movie was the pleasurable shock of humans and these transformative mechanical beings interacting. The third chapter is dedicated to little more than wanton destruction."

Variety’s review notes that the movie is much improved over the successful but widely reviled second installment: “Bay seems to have placed a slightly higher value on visual coherence, holding the frame longer than usual, demonstrating more continuity in the editing, allowing the viewer to savor the cars' 3D-enhanced transformations in tantalizing slow-motion, and including enough wide shots to allow for a more generous, less claustrophobic view of the action. The result may still be a big, bloated spectacle, but it's a big, bloated spectacle you can just about follow.”

CinemaBlend calls the movie “lifeless” but also says that that’s the point. “Dark of the Moon has taken out all the bad jokes and the boring stuff to give us two and a half hours full of nothing but the biggest special effects any movie has ever offered in stunning 3D, and it’s doing it better than any other movie has before.

The three hot topics: the spectacular Battle for Chicago sequence, which makes up about a third of the film, the total eye candy of Megan Fox replacement Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and the over-the-top performances Ken Jeong, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and John Turturro.

“If you’re going to be in a movie with robots, you might as well act circles around them,” says THR about the supporting actors. “Chew the scenery before the action figures destroy it is their motto."

Hitfix provided one of the more enthusiastic reviews, calling it “easily the best film in the series” and noting “there's a solid hour-long action sequence in Chicago that uses everything Bay's ever done before, but all blended into one exhausting push to save one girl in the midst of a war involving two planets. It's the personal story on an apocalyptic scale that Bay loves to try to tell, and that other guys like Emmerich and Cameron and even Spielberg love to do. And this is the best version of it that Bay's made so far.”

The movie opens Wednesday in North America.