Michael Bay and company unload the Energon with all barrels blazing for the final (?) ‘Transformers’ film, finally delivering the summer blockbuster that fans and audiences have been waiting for from the beginning of this stalling franchise.
Warning: PLOT SPOILERS!!! (well…if you care)
In a movie franchise which started off with a bullet-ridden yet enjoyable thrill ride (which blew most audiences right through the roof with the final climactic battle) in 2007, followed by one of the most painful summer movie experiences in recent memory with 2009’s suck-fest ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, it seems that the last thing the world (except for the lowest of life-forms on the film-fan totem pole) wanted was another fart-joke, awkward humor, and coma-inducing explosion fest from Michael Bay about giant robots who occasionally show up on screen to smash things when annoying as colon-cancer ‘characters’ dick around for two hours. It had gotten to the point where critics and movie-goers alike had condemned the third installment, ‘Dark of the Moon’, before Optimus could utter a syllable within the first second of the trailer. (As if to prove this, the third entry in the trilogy opened with only $37.3 million on its Wednesday opening, the weakest opening of the three films.)
But in a Hollywood hack-fest world where the third in a popular franchise based on a fan-boy property is worse than bloated leeches (Spider-Man 3, X-Men 3, Star Wars Prequel 3 and Blade 3 anyone?), it seems that Bay has finally taken a hint from the verbal pummeling that ‘Revenge’ had received (doesn’t he know that the second movie is ALWAYS the best?) and decided to step back a bit before blasting ahead with his (supposedly) final film in the car-turning-into-cool-shit saga.
And boy does it pay off.
Gone are the horrendous, and for some reason plentiful, scenes of dogs (and robots) humping other animals or the legs of hot “actresses”. Gone are Mom and Dad running amok on drugs, talking about sex and masturbation non-stop (Kevin Dunn and Julie White are only in TWO short scenes this time folks), while son Sam (Shia LaBeouf) mutters like a machine-gun embarrassed for a good half hour or so. Gone, in fact, is practically everything that has made the first two ‘Transformers’ so very, very painful to watch. The big surprise? Not only do the comedic scenes NOT make you want to blow your own head off with an Iron Hide cannon…they actually make you laugh.
The film opens with a bogus, yet believable considering we live in the movie-world of ‘Watchmen’ and ‘X-Men: First Class’ where it’s okay to diss on history, montage of an alien spacecraft (fanboys, such as I, will perk up in their seats when they hear ‘The Ark) crashing on the moon and JFK ordering NASA to get cracking on finding the damn thing before the Ruskies do (so thaaaaat’s why we beat them there! Robots!) There’s even a cameo by the great Buzz Aldrin himself playing…himself, in one of the most absurd meta moments in an alternate history film since…I really don’t think that’s been done before. Not only did the guy get to walk on the Moon before everyone else on the planet (‘cept Neil of course), he gets an in-movie “The honor is all mine” from the man himself, Optimus Prime. So, it’s basically Michael Bay’s excuse to fuck with our past.
And I’m okay with that.
We find our human protagonist Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) out of college and jobless, frustrated that he’s getting no recognition for having saved the world twice from evil robots (understandable). The army is high-fiving Bumblebee, Iron Hide, Ratchet and co. as they hunt down “turrists” (terrorists) and the occasional Decepticon. There to console him, along with the men in the audience, is new-comer Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Carly, who’s taking over as “the Hot Chick in the Robot Movie” for Megan Fox after the later had reportedly had come to on-set fist-o-cuffs with director Bay. Frankly, she’s better than Fox, surprisingly holding her own with LaBeouf and utilizing a character which carries more of an emotional core (don’t get me wrong, she’s still NOT an actress, but for some reason she just works as a legit character.)
John Turturro is back (and finally not annoying like in Part One and not showing his ass to the audience like in Part Two), and we’re happy to see him. He’s funny, he has a purpose to the plot (what?!) and he even has a connection to new-comer Agent Mearing (played by Veteran actress of Coen Brothers fame, Frances McDormand), who is also a welcome presence. She could easily just be “That Government Agent Who’s a Total Dick For No Reason Like That Asshole in Revenge of the Fallen” but she reminds us of William Fickner or Keith David in ‘Armageddon’. She carries a purpose, she keeps the comedy toned down, and for the most part…she’s right. I actually found myself on side with her as she does her best to keep the Transformers Initiative Operation (or whatever it’s called) from being blown wide open and getting innocent people killed.
With great voice-acting by Peter Cullen as Optimus, Hugo Weaving as (a very bad ass, Mad Max-esque) Megatron, Frank Welker as both Soundwave and Shockwave, and joining the team as the mysterious Sentinel Prime, Mr. Leonard Nimoy (who makes a CGI robot more dimensional than he probably deserves), we’re finally on board for the Michael Bay kind of summer blockbuster that hadn’t been seen since ‘Armageddon’ and ‘The Rock’. The stakes are higher, the tension is more serious and evenly dispersed (no dumb jokes interrupting an honest-to-Cybertron dramatic moment), and the action is for once watchable. A huge opponent of 3D, I’m sorry to say I have to champion its merits in ‘Dark of the Moon’; Bay is a technical wizard if not a legit filmmaker and he cares deeply about how 3D is employed in his film (he wrote a very professional letter to movie theater projectionists about how best to show the film). The use of 3D techniques required Bay to slow down, pop some Ritalin, and use some reasonable pacing and editing for once. The constantly shaking and bouncing camera among millions of cuts and shots per minute of film are gone, allowing the audience to absorb and enjoy the battles, the characters. The cinematography at times is absolutely gorgeous, showcasing wonderfully horrible scenes of Chicago under siege with airships circling the sky and rubble in the streets, evoking the way Christopher Nolan brought Gotham to life in ‘The Dark Knight.’ Bay takes his time to truly build the tension, creating a rather terrifying moment where the main cast of humans are trapped in a slowly-collapsing building, all the while a Terminator-esque Decepticon is hunting them down.
While the story is the best of the trilogy, introducing an interesting side-plot of human elitists (led by a back-stabbing Patrick Dempsey) siding with the Decepticons in order to get high seats of power in the apocalyptic take-over, it still relies heavily on plot-points from the second film. Bay keeps the tension and tone fairly consistent, except for a moment with a stupidly-ridiculous co-worker of Sam’s (Ken Jeong of ‘Community’ fame) being annoying for no reason at all (to be fair, his scene is NOTHING compared to the shit in ‘Revenge), and a scene where Sentinel Prime betrays Optimus and the Autobots, ushering in the Decepticon age. The world’s in danger, Sam is worried for his girlfriend, yet his parents suddenly pop back in for some unnecessary comedy which completely undercuts the tension Bay was building.
While this movie is far from great, still has nothing on ‘Armageddon’ or ‘The Rock’, it ranks as Bay’s third best movie (not saying much, I know), frankly I’m annoyed by the poor attention that critics have given this installment. It seems that most of the world will hate movies about giant robots based on a toy franchise no matter how good it is (I’m surprised they even liked ‘The Dark Knight’). ‘Dark of the Moon’ is the most coherent, easy to watch and enjoy (and easy to not want to kill yourself halfway through) of the three films. Fanboys have finally been given the ‘Transformers’ movie that they’ve been waiting for since 2007, and audiences are ensured to at least have an enjoyable time at the movies. While not as good as ‘X-Men: First Class’ or, I hope, the upcoming ‘Harry Potter’ finale, ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’ is so far the blockbuster event of the Summer and is a bad ass, epic thrill ride worthy of being “More than meets the eye”, mostly thanks to a toned-down Michael Bay.
And if anything, Optimus blows a robot’s head off with an Autobot shot-gun. Seriously, what’s not to love?
Transformers: Dark of the Moon *** ½ Stars (Out of Four)
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