transformers - dark of the moon

I seem to have missed something with these new transformer films.

In the original comic book series the Ark crashes on the earth millions of years ago.  It crashes in a volcano, from memory, and the robots on the ark are from both sides - autobots and decepticons.  I seem to recall that the ark is revived by the volcano re-activating and proceeds to repair all the robots utilising modern man's technology as the template for their rebuilding.

Reading the Wikipedia entry this isn't quite what happened in the first film - there's a crash landing on earth, but it's only Megatron.  It's also not millions of years ago, but probably hundreds.

I mean, I'd twigged that it was not millions of years (no Dinobots ever :() but I dunno - for some reason I'd thought the film was closer to the original, and not just Megatron.  The problem for me is this makes the stories in the films even more confusing.  I mean, I'd found them a bit confusing and non-sensical the first time, but having missed that it wasn't the ark that crash landed, I was very confused to find that in this third film the ark crash lands at the beginning :/.

I mean, why do the autobots and decepticons look like human cars and planes, etc, if they've not been remade in the image of our machines?  It gives them a stealth quality while here, but surely that would have been ridiculous on their home world?  But also does that mean they can change what they transform into?

Anyway, point is I hadn't realised the films were quite so divergent.  When I did realise this, at the start of this third film, I think it kinda made me see this third one in a slightly different light.  I mean, I don't think it's a good film in the sense of having a deep plot and well written characters, just that the fact that it was different to the comics/cartoons didn't bother me as much - I judged more on its own merits.

I think this film is the best of the three, though as I say, I may be judging it slightly differently.  The plot is certainly more coherent in my opinion.  Also, rather than try to be a direct sequel, it seems to simply be "later on" so you don't get so much in the way of those rubbish bits in the second one where they try to fudge things to get Megatron back to life.

And I think that's its main strength - it's not really carrying any baggage.  The first film you had all the issues over what they'd changed (which clearly I missed some of!), the second they were trying to make it a 'proper' sequel, but this third one they don't care so much and just spend the time blowing as much stuff up as possible (well, it's still a Michael Bay film after all).

I guess it's more playful is the point, so I found it a bit more enjoyable.