Yes, I saw it at the cheap theater. The normal ones are like $10.50 at night.  Ugh.  So, a better question would be – was it worth $10.50?  The answer there is “maybe”.

It really depends on what you expect from these things, I guess.  And by “these things” I mean “summer blockbusters”, because that’s all this was.  I think that, in the sense that this movie was targeted (even moreso than the standard male gaze) at teenage males and the teenage male locked not particularly tightly inside every adult male … it succeeds.  I mean, the special effects are indeed, fucking crazy.  The robots look great.  The ruined city set piece was great.  The falling building scene was pretty crazy.  The re-created historical scenes were neat.  Scenes with people flying all over and being caught by robots looked about as good as they could.  I mean, until we get our stunt robots trained up well enough that we don’t have to replace them with CGI in the action scenes at least.

Not to say I’m defending the movie – I mean, if you apply any kind of “serious criticism” (if such a thing exists, sometimes I’m not convinced) to the movie, pretty much everything falls apart.  My thoughts just run more along the lines of “Why would you defend it?”

A) It’s not worth it
B) You would lose that debate
C) There is nothing in this movie that asked me to be taken seriously

You know how people call things “films”? I wouldn’t call this that.

The plot had more holes and motivational wtfs than a zombified piece of sentient swiss cheese gardening.  But GIANT ROBOTS.  I guess maybe they shouldn’t inherently preclude seriousness… but at least for this incarnation of the franchise, for me, they do.   We know what to expect by now, right?

Sure, I’d love for someone to relaunch the franchise and do it up with a little more “respect” and seriousness and much less women running in high heels and robots that weren’t so damn shiny .   Maybe that would be the kind of movie I could consider thinking about seriously.  For this one, I just wanted to pay a couple bucks and see giant robots.

One thing that really annoyed me (even more than the zooms on Rosie’s face and awkward butt camera angles (a given with Bay, right?)) was that in one scene an Autobot kicked a defeated Decepticon into a potentially inhabited building (which exploded, even though plenty of times we see robots getting pulled apart without exploding – like I said, nothing makes consistent sense if you think about it too long).  Um?   That is not something an Autobot would ever do.  As an extension of that, none of the Autobots made any effort (that I could see) to avoid collateral damage – they seem to avoid intentionally killing humans but uh… don’t care much about doing it on accident.  Very not Autobot.

Final verdict?

Worth $6 to see on the big screen.

I didn’t see it in 3d, so I can’t speak to that.

Iron Fist 27: Yes, Danny Rand/Iron Fist will also be a father soon, following in his perennial buddy, Luke Cage/Power Man’s footsteps.  Also of note, and implied by my goofy title, is that the mother of said child (and soon to be wife of Danny) is Misty Knight.  Now.  This is comics.  So her or the baby could go kaput or turn into an alien at any time, for no good reason BUT, luckily no one else seems to care about writing Misty at the moment – so I think they are safe!

Also, this was the final issue of Immortal Fist.  Such a shame, it’s been a great series so far and deserved more than it got (much like Captain Britain & MI13).

X-Factor 45: Answers a question asked by only the most diligent fanfolk (ok, that’s still a lot): were Rictor and Shatterstar together?  Beyond that, the ongoing arcs continue in interesting ways, and things start to come together.

Astonishing X-Men 30:  Something happened here. Forge “died” I think, in a really strange and silly ending that I don’t think anyone saw coming to a story that started looking like something out of 90s Claremont’s and wound up 90s Ennis.  Not bad, but not particularly good, and I think Ellis can do better.

Apparently the entire point of Avengers-Invanders was to resurrect Toro, who no one cares about.  Or the original Human Torch, one of them.  DUMB.  Leading into the new Human Torch mini coming out later this year I’m sure.  The ending was rather horrid – but how else are you going to end a story where the bad guy is omnipotent?

Whatever the current Messiah Mini Event is finally ended a recent issue of X-Force or Cable.  It was actually decent, except that in the end it didn’t mean anything.  Except that Dom killed Kiden in the future.  That’s basically it.  Fun.  Curious to see how X-F will pick up the pieces of Boom-Boom now though.  Shame, she was wonderful with the right writers.  Go NEXTWAVE!

A bunch of Dark Reign minis came out.  They’re all pretty stupid.  The Lethal Legion thing may stir up some interest with the Wonder Man in jail angle though… that last panel was a little creepy.

Daken has taken over Wolverine‘s title, which is good because there was too damn much of one Wolverine – thankfully now we have 3 separate Wolverine’s to spread around.  !?

Now Wolverine’s “main” book is the Weapon X one – doing stuff that would have been in the normal Wolverine book so uh, whatever.  !?

Guardians of the Galaxy 15 was good and ended pretty much the only way it could (on the War of Kings angle), although still somewhat surprisingly.  And I hear the “old” Guardians are returning… that actually makes me very vary.  I think I’ll drop the book if it becomes about them.  Their time is over.  Vance I can take, but the others… meh, they work in the future, not in the past.  For me anyway.

I skimmed through Transformers: All Hail Megatron – it seems pretty decently written, if you’ve got a Transformers itch that the movie just didn’t scratch (which is understandable, as it was mostly trying to scratch your scrotum).