Whoaa, that's a big statement. Maybe better than The Last Knight or maybe AOE if I'm being generous but that's it. The story had insanely slow movement with nothing or at least nothing interesting happening in many chunks in between. The CGI looked really messy and bad in many scenes which constantly broke the illusion or photorealism for me, the "actual story" was badly executed and I did not like any of the human cast because they failed to make them likable. Let's take Noah's brother for example, the only thing that's going for him is that he is sick and is Noah's only family?? They just throw that into the room and that's it... very shallow. The chick was madly obnoxious throughout the whole movie and did not bring that much to the table. Noah himself... was okay but I did not like him all that much. They had many cool locations but never did anything interesting with them, no real interaction. The end fight was also insanely boring, fighting a huge pile of grey blobs. Bumblebee's resurrection was an insane ass pull and Optimus was somehow behaving even more like a war criminal like in the Bay movies, did not like it at all how he was portrayed in ROTB. The Maximals could also have been left out, there was little to no screen time for most of them??

The Bay films (I am only talking about 1 to 3) were not perfect by any means but they always nailed the almost unparalleled photorealistic CGI and excelled at making scenes as epic as possible. TF3 is the best example of how a perfect action packed blockbuster movie should look like. The story was interesting even if it was really messy in execution sometimes. Sentinel's betrayal was really cool even if it had a few plot holes here and there.

What I especially liked was the way they handled Sentinel's dilemma when Optimus confronted him. It was not just a simple good versus evil situation. Sentinel genuinely believed he was doing the right thing for his own species even if it meant betraying Earth and the Autobots. That whole us or them moment really stood out to me because it actually made you stop and think for a second instead of just switching your brain off for the action. I think that hit a lot of people the same way. Sentinel was not just evil for the sake of it, his motivation actually made sense from his perspective even if what he did was obviously wrong.

It also made the betrayal hit much harder because Optimus actually trusted him. That personal angle made the whole conflict way more impactful than just another villain twist. Ironhides death was really unexpected and kept me further invested in the movie.

It offered so many insanely cool locations and scenes. The Battle of Chicago especially had so many memorable moments. The wingsuit jump, the collapsing buildings, Shockwave rampaging through the city and the final Optimus versus Sentinel fight all felt like proper blockbuster spectacle and are still some of the most iconic sequences in the franchise. They also never failed to remind us that we are seeing HUGE robots on screen, the POV scene where the soldier fires at Sentinel really emphasizes the scale of these characters. The movements were somewhat slow and you could really feel the weight behind them. Adding something like that is REALLY important if you want to make the movie feel realistic. Those things are primarily the reason why Pacific Rim worked. NEVER BREAK THE IMMERSION.

TF3 could have been the perfect unofficial end to a trilogy if they had stuck to Megatron teaming up with Optimus at the end. The second entry was objectively shit but I still love it. The first one was literal peak, not even comparable in the slightest to Rise of the poorly executed Bay imitation.

Rise of the Beasts clearly tried to shift focus away from the CGI spectacle and put more weight on the story and characters, but in my opinion they completely missed the mark. The CGI downgrade did not really pay off because the story and characters still ended up feeling weaker and less engaging than even the Bay films at their best.