Tyler, how about Vfx this time?
I wish I could give a hard-and-fast "they were great", but I'd be hesitant to do so.
Is it bad? Of course not. Is it better than the other movies? No. Will it be nominated for the Oscar? Probably not. Think of it like the Iron Man/Avengers movies. The Iron Man armour, while technically speaking gets better and better, end up looking more and more cartoony as the movies go on. The VFX are still great, but it's hard to top the original Iron Man armor or Transformers in the first movies of the respective franchises.
ILM really gets to flex their muscles on full CG environments this time around, since such a large portion takes place in space, underwater or in otherwise artificial environments. The best work in the movie was probably character of Cogman the crazy robot butler, the close-up of the
floating Optimus body in space (looks 125% photoreal and tangible, it's crazy!) and the giant underwater vessel that rises to the surface where Optimus and Bumblebee have their fight.
The animation really embued the craft with a sense of scale and the CG water was top notch. And with Bay's camera work getting steadily more stable as the franchise progresses, we are able to see a lot more.
There were some turkey shots in the form of some digital double work, in my opinion. But they were few and far between and not as distracting as the lesser shots in
Age of Extinction.
TL;DR Some more A+ work from ILM that isn't much to write home about.
Yes I know he's said this before but I can hope beyond hope Bay simply makes good on it this time and moves on to making superior films in the vein of 13 Hours or even Pain and Gain. I am hoping Knight's Bumblebee really impresses so the studio can move into a post-Bay Transformers era with confidence.
Agreed. I like Bay, but at this point in the franchise, you either need to reboot or have Bay take off his director's hat and put on the producer's hat instead. Or at the very least let him get his creative juices flowing again with another smaller scale passion project before returning to the world of shape-shifting alien robots. He actually said he was reading a script recently of a movie he's considering to direct. Something like a murder thriller or a cop thriller. Thriller-something. Here's hoping he gets his hands on that.
I have high hopes for the Bumblebee movie, which like you said, will hopefully make the studio look to other, more inspired choices for
TF6.
Well, I saw TRANSFORMERS 5, and...a lot of stuff happened.
149 minutes of stuff happening. There was, uh... well... and then er... Gimme some time, it'll come back to me.
