The midtown-Manhattan crowd  real people, not movie reviewers, except for this one  stood patiently in line for a 12:15 a.m. screening of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in Michael Bay's ear-, eye- and block-buster series based on the line of Hasbro robot toys. When the feature began, a half hour late, the audience showed its fondness for the material by saluting each appearance of the friendly yellow car-bot Bumblebee, not with rowdy shouts but with courteous applause, as if after a sharp volley at Wimbledon. A few whoops greeted the 3-D IMAX leveling of Chicago. And when the movie ended, about an hour before dawn, the admirers let out a few decorous cheers. They sounded less like red-meat fanboys than connoisseurs at a wine tasting. 
 
 The critics' reaction has been more tentative. They decried the first Transformers (2007) and its sequel Revenge of the Fallen (2009), which together earned more than $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office. They charged Bay with failing all conventional (perhaps archaic) tests for coherence of storytelling and mise-en-scène. He sends the camera scampering in virtually every shot, even those lasting a split second, and he seems to think that matching them  locating a fixed point of view, a law that directors have followed since the earliest features  is for wimps. Reviewers of the first two films got so vexed by Bay's eroticized violence, his car lust and carnage, his nonstop aural and cinematic assaults, that they saw his success in apocalyptic terms, as the end of movies as we once loved them and the triumph of a virulent new strain: robotulism. T3 screenwriter Ethan Kroeger mimics the typical critique of a Bay film when he has John Malkovich, as the hero's epicurean boss, say, "You fall into a life-sucking abyss. It's a visual and therefore visceral betrayal." (See the 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films.) 
 
 With T3, many reviewers have retreated from their previous horrified stance to baffled resignation. I'm with them. I acknowledge that, for good or ill, Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood's military-entertainment complex. T3 is the movie equivalent of an '80s thrash-metal concert (not Megadeth but Megatron), with bits of spoken exposition inserted into the action scenes like the lead singer's mumbled comments between songs. And yes, for Bay to give Optimus Prime and the other good Autobots blue eyes and Megatron's evil Decepticons red eyes smacks of aesthetic fascism, but in a helpful way: how else are novice viewers to tell them apart? It's all part of the director's grand, lubricious vision  what we might call Bay-watch. 
 
 Plot synopsis: Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), blah blah, Optimus and Megatron knocking heads again, new Autobot named Sentinel (voiced by Leonard Nimoy), secret government project run by a bossy woman (Frances McDormand, more or less playing Hillary Clinton if she ran the CIA, and if you hate Hillary Clinton), new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, whose generic blond sexiness makes her both a fembot and Playboy Femlin), big bot battle that devastates downtown Chicago (notably the aptly named Wacker Drive), blah blah, bring in the U.S. military and somehow let Sam command them to save the world  if he can first get Carly out of that Decepticon car that is trying to fondle her with its grabby tentacles. 
 
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 See the All-TIME 100 Movies. ||||| After you've seen the movie, listen to Dana Stevens and John Swansburg's Spoiler Special about Transformers: Dark of the Moon or with the player below: 
 
 The colossally destructive, almost comically long final battle sequence of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount Pictures) culminates in at least a temporary vanquishing of the earth-invading Decepticons by the more human-friendly Autobots. But the entirety of the film stands as proof of robotic life's inevitable triumph over Homo sapiens. Faced with this quantity of hardware, this degree of technical sophistication, this goddamn many robots, organic life doesn't stand a chance. We might as well amuse ourselves with tales of the war between two fictional robot races, now that Michael Bay has taken over the world. 
 
 It's been a slow colonization, with each of the three successive Transformers films ratcheting up the onslaught. In the first, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a high-school kid in love with his car, discovers that the black-and-yellow Chevy Camaro, Bumblebee, is really a giant sentient robot from the mechanical planet Cybertron. Sam gets drawn into the war between the planet's two exiled races, who eventually trash downtown L.A. in their struggle for intergalactic domination. In the second film—well, pretty much the same thing happens again, except that Sam is now a college kid who's definitively landed his dream girl (Megan Fox, who was fired from the franchise after jokingly comparing Bay to Hitler) and the monuments sacrificed to cosmic war are the Great Pyramids. 
 
 With Dark of the Moon, Bay takes the more-is-more aesthetic of the first two movies up another several notches. Forget about critic-proof; this movie is critic-obliterating. It's a tank that flattens everything that gets in its way, including the audience. There is something awe-inspiring about Bay's sheer commitment to scale—augmented now by that state-of-the-art anti-audience weapon, 3-D. But marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull. 
 
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 The dullness kicks in almost immediately after the appealingly loopy cold open, which posits a paranoid alternate version of the moon landing. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have secretly been sent to investigate an alien spacecraft that's crashed on the lunar surface. (The real Aldrin appears in a cameo later in the film, somewhat surprisingly given the astronaut's history of run-ins with moon-landing conspiracy theorists.) The craft's occupant is Sentinel Prime (voiced, pleasingly, by Leonard Nimoy), an aged Autobot leader thought dead in the war that destroyed their planet. The alien is brought back to Earth, where he eventually meets up with his successor Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who's been voicing this character ever since his early days as a TV-cartoon hero.). After some nattering about who should possess the Matrix of Leadership (which is not a managerial manual but a kind of airborne power-conferring crystal), the two Primes join forces to foil what has to be one of the worst-thought-through evil schemes in movie-villain history: something about towing the planet Cybertron close to Earth and enslaving the human population to rebuild it, as if it were an offshore oil rig? 
 
 Sam, now a recent college graduate, has been unable to find a job, so he's living off the ample salary (and other ample gifts) of his English girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria's Secret model whose blank moue recalls Guess? Jeans model and onetime Mickey Rourke paramour Carré Otis). Carly works for a car-collecting billionaire (Patrick Dempsey) who may have even more nefarious plans afoot than just stealing Sam's girlfriend. John Malkovich, Ken Jeong, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, and Frances McDormand also mill in and out as … people who react to the giant battling robots and, less often, to one anothers' lines. 
 
 Call me carbon-based, but I can't for the life of me keep straight which of the warring vehicle-based automatons is which: Megatron, Starscream, Ironside, Ratchet, the millionaire, his wife. (Do female machines exist on the planet Cybertron? Never mind; don't answer that.) These massive machines duke it out in the foreground while tiny people—some in high-tech wingsuits, some in high heels and tight jeans—scurry through the wreckage at their feet. The endless action climax includes a falling-skyscraper scene that casually plunders 9/11 for visual references (floating scraps of paper, falling office chairs) without paying the obligatory tax of pathos or political allegory such scenes usually demand. At one point, a character refers to downtown Chicago, where the alien battle is taking place, as "Ground Zero." Ten years after the fall of the Twin Towers, the attack, like the moon landing, has become a source of stock historical references. 
 
 Occasionally, a nifty action idea bobs to the surface, like some business involving the leads' slide down the outside of a sharply canted glass building. (In this movie, even a brief nod to the laws of physics counts as subtlety.) But everything is soon pounded to rubble under the Volkswagen-sized fists of Bay's mechanized heroes and villains. Somewhere deep into the perhaps 40-minute-long crescendo of action that ends this movie, I began to experience a dazed sense of submission, a cowed respect for our new CGI overlords. Other sci-fi franchises—the Terminator series most notably—pit vulnerable but canny humans against soulless time-traveling robots in a struggle for supremacy. Transformers takes the struggle to the next, posthuman level. On Earth as on Cybertron, and certainly at the box office, the robots have already won. 
 
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 Like This Story Follow Slate's Movies ||||| Transformers: Age of Extinction SCIENCE FICTION/ACTION: United States, 2014 U.S. Release Date: 2014-06-27 Running Length: 2:45 MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Violence, Profanity, Painful Dialogue) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Cast: Mark Wahlberg , Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Titus Welliver, Peter Cullen (voice), John Goodman (voice) Director: Michael Bay Screenplay: Ehren Kruger Cinematography: Amir Mokri Music: Steve Jablonsky U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures Subtitles: none 
 
 Michael Bay has often said how he loves to "blow things up real good." Well, if that's his desire in life, there's little doubt that he tops himself in Transformers: Age of Extinction. This is as excruciating a movie as is likely to be experienced by anyone, anywhere. It isn't merely that the story is insulting, the characters are bland, the action is dull, and the CGI is everywhere - it's that all this goes on for nearly three hours. That's three hours of your life you'll never get back. 
 
 Bay's argument is that the Transformers movies are made for the little kid in all of us. That might be true, assuming the kid is pugnacious, antisocial, afflicted with an attention span approaching zero, and lacking in anything remotely resembling a creative impulse. My inner child often delights in silly, loud, or otherwise unsophisticated films. Parts of Godzilla gave me chills. Misgivings aside, I'm looking forward to the next Star Wars. And, despite its recent precipitous nosedive, I still adore Doctor Who. But that inner child quails at the thought of enduring even one more minute of a Transformers movie. The only thing more epic about this film than its running length is its soullessness. 
 
 Bay keeps saying he's done with the Transformers franchise but it draws him back like flies to shit. This time around, the human actors from the earlier films have been jettisoned. At first glance, that might seem like a good thing until one realizes that people in Bay films are as interesting and important as background décor. It's really all about the robots, the orgiastic display of CGI destruction, and (of course) the explosions. I wish I could say "just sit back and enjoy the ride", but there's a reason roller coasters are only a few minutes long. 
 
 Is there a story here? It's not War and Peace but there's something that might be mistaken for the skeleton of a plot if viewed in dim light. For those who care about continuity, events in Transformers: Age of Extinction take place five years after those of the previous film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. By this time, the Transformers have been virtually eliminated from Earth as a result of a ruthless cleansing scheme spearheaded by CIA Black Ops hotshot Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer in full Stinky Pete mode). Attinger has help from a Decepticon called "Lockdown" (voice of Mark Ryan), who has come to Earth in search of Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen). The CIA bad guy has also formed an alliance with billionaire inventor Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), who has figured out how to build Transformers. His pilot project is something he calls "Galvatron" (voice of Frank Welker) - a robot that looks an awful like the dreaded (and supposedly dead) Megatron. 
 
 The basic thrust of Transformers: Age of Extinction follows the misadventures of four surviving Autobots - Bumblebee, Hound (voice of John Goodman), Crosshairs (voice of John DiMaggio), and Drift (voice of Ken Watanabe) - as they seek out Optimus Prime, who has been revived with the help of Texas mechanic Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg). Along with Cade, his daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), and Tessa's boyfriend, Shane (Jack Reynor), the Autobots seek to avoid being captured or destroyed by Lockdown while possibly saving Earth from Galvatron. (Lockdown doesn't really care about humans - he just wants Optimus Prime.) Bay once again deals Chicago a gut punch but this time around he saves the real destruction for Hong Kong. 
 
 In the acting department, Mark Wahlberg is an upgrade on Shia Labeouf, although it hardly matters. Walhberg does his job and stands around looking suitably awed, angry, or frightened, depending on what the script requires. Somehow, Stanley Tucci manages to rise above the material and leave an impression. It helps that he's used partially for comedic relief and gets to utter the best one-liner (one that uses up the movie's PG-13 single "f-word" allowance). Tucci's success is counterbalanced by Nicola Peltz's failure. The Transformers movies have had their share of annoying characters but none (not even the one played by Megan Fox) has achieved the apex occupied by Peltz's Tessa, who one-ups the worst horror movie heroine in terms of incompetence, ignorance, and irritation factor. On more than one occasion, I was actively rooting for a robot to stomp on her or for her to fall from a great height and make a satisfying splat. I guess this could be considered a step forward for Bay - he made me feel something about a human being in a Transformers film. 
 
 In the end, there's a sense that nothing much happens in Transformers: Age of Extinction, although that "nothing" is long, loud, and flashy. Bay's approach, which is technically proficient but without charm or life, bludgeons viewers into a near-catatonic state. If one takes a step back and looks at Transformers: Age of Extinction from a distance, the story isn't confusing but, while watching it, the sense of chaos is almost overwhelming. Shakespeare didn't know it, but when he wrote of "sound and fury signifying nothing," he could have been describing this franchise. 
 
 I understand that this is a "fanboy" driven production intended only to please those who either play with Transformers toys or have fond memories of doing so in their youth. However, it's disappointing to see how contemptuous the filmmakers are of anyone who pays good money to see a movie in the hope that it will offer more than cool special effects (that become progressively less "cool" the longer the film runs). This is blockbuster moviemaking at its worst - a product so cynical that it doesn't try to pretend it's anything more than a mindless spectacle. It's endless, tiresome, and tedious, but it will make so much money that Transformers 5 is a foregone conclusion. I can't think of a more compelling reason to hate Transformers: Age of Extinction. 
 
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– Negative reviews are like Energon Cubes to Michael Bay—they only make him stronger. His first two Transformers movies were universally trashed by critics, and the latest—Transformers: Dark Of The Moon—is no different according to its 37% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But it's not like Optimus Prime will ever give Colin Firth competition at the Oscars. While some members of the press see the movie as a popcorn flick that's at least better than Revenge Of The Fallen, others wish it would have changed into something more interesting. John Anderson of the Wall Street Journal calls it "a black hole of technology, talent and time. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is a symptom of many things, chief among them the fact that summer blockbuster movies don't really matter anymore." Slate's Dana Stevens sees a glimmer of a silver-plated lining. "There is something awe-inspiring about Bay's sheer commitment to scale—augmented now by that state-of-the-art anti-audience weapon, 3-D," Stevens writes. "But marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull." Richard Corliss of Time is a bit more accepting. "T3 is the movie equivalent of an '80s thrash-metal concert (not Megadeth but Megatron), with bits of spoken exposition inserted into the action scenes like the lead singer's mumbled comments between songs." Tom Charity of CNN might be the most realistic in his resignation. "It's a lousy movie, but at least it's a lousy movie with a serviceable story, killer CGI and an action climax that goes on forever," he writes. "An awful lot of people like that kind of thing—my kids included."