I wanted this to be better but it was so bad. Not quite 2 bad but it tried really hard. It was all over the place (more so than usual for these movies which is saying something), basically everything made no sense, the entire plot line could have been interchanged with literally anything and you couldn't have noticed, colossal lack of Dinobots and Peter Cullen, the only continuity with the last movie was Marky Mark existing and knowing the bots. The Decepticons are back to normal for some reason except now they're under space girls power because why not. Except for Starscream because also why not.
Every run of Transformers has their own version of the lore, which is fine and normally interesting, but there's some really cool lore & origin stories to work with in the cannon or mainstream versions and instead we get 100% random sci-fi trope deus ex machina with no background despite them putting in flashbacks and exposition. That's how no background it was, they specifically spend like 30 minutes on making a background and it still didn't have one to speak of.
Basically, everything wrong with movie 2 was put back into this one, except they had less Prime and less defiling Devastator and more Anthony Hopkins (inexplicably, I might add).
I don't normally hate on Hollywood for mucking up things with reboots or remakes or adaptions or whatever because I always still have the old thing to go back to and normally they let it die. But each of these movies has like, a few minutes of really good Transformery stuff in it and those sparks make we want them to seriously just try once. This one bombed hard compared to the others (I know I didn't pay to see it, contrary to my original plan) so maybe it'll be passed on or rebooted again or just fade away and stop being distracting. Can't even blame Bay directly because it's not like he writes the damn things and these scripts would be awful with anybody behind the helm.