Unjustified hate?

70% of Woody's flicks are pretentious garbage ... the rest are pure genius.

RoTF is a mess. The first film is ok.

I feel most of the complaints targeting this film are justified, and that most people who played a role in the making of it agree to a certain extent. This movie is an example of why it is not such a good idea to rush such a major release during writer's strike because no matter how much money you throw at it if the story doesn't have the strongest focus nothing else will make up for much of it. Everybody in this tries too hard to imitate the tone and style of the first film with x number of tropes you see in x number of other sequels and the strain especially shows pretty easily. The first movie did not have a strong plot but it was strong enough to carry itself to a 145 runtime, parts 3 and 4 have their problems but at least their intentions were still more clear.

Wonder how different the movie would had been IF the writer's strike didn't happen...Some ideas are interesting here, but the execution is off.

One of the things that Bayformers fans spend most of their young lives trying to point out is that they're meant to be mindless, easily enjoyable action movies and escapism. That's fine, I love exploitation films and classic action movies like Commando. However, what made those movies fun to watch is they have a lot of heart put in to them while the Bayformers movies are not only incoherent, but painfully cynical too.

Look at The Raid, the action is top notch and the story is compelling. Transfomers 2, in comparison, was unacceptable. What people don't realise about Transformers 2 though is that it originally would have been a great film, but the writer's strike happened. People also blame Michael Bay too much for gratuity when that's the faults of the producers and screenwriters, and the actors too for not challenging him at any point.