TRANSFORMERS : DARK OF THE MOON

Look here it is, Michael Bay somehow manages to simultaneously represent both the worst and best of cinema with his movies. When he gets it wrong you get lumbered with miserable arse gravy like Armageddon. When he gets it right you get presented with rousing, over the top, bombastic nonsense like The Rock that’s just impossible to dislike. When he’s on form he makes cinema fun. He makes the kind of films that multiplex’s love, and the kind of movies that those who consider their taste to be more refined, love to hate (but secretly love also, and try and make themselves feel a bit better by calling them ‘guilty pleasures’). The first two Transformers movies are total ‘guilty pleasures’ for me! You know what you’re getting with his movies though. Explosions, slo-mo military fetishization and plot holes you could drive a Hum Vee through (provided that Hum Vee is racing at 100mph down a hill in San Franciso, smashing up traffic and destroying trams). Therefore it seems a bit lame to lambast one of his films for being poorly acted, having a shit plot and not providing you with a single likeable character. But damnit that’s what ended up bugging me about Transformers : Dark Of The Moon.

Before we go any further let’s start with the plot, such as it is. A crashed Autobot ship is discovered on the moon and it turns out the moon landings were a cover up for an investigation of the crash site. Soon enough the Decepticons show up and all hell breaks loose as they try to use a ‘space bridge’ to bring Cybertron into Earth’s orbit. Meanwhile Sam Witwicky is living in Washington with a new girlfriend and trying to find a job. So in essence, it’s just a load of old ‘make it up as we go along’ shit; inventing one endless Autobot plot device / ‘mcguffin’ after the other, to try and paper over the cracks and ghastly chasms in continuity between the 3 movies.

Is it unfair to expect a bit more from a film like this?  Is it stupid to want a bit of characterisation and decent acting? Or should I just sit back and just enjoy the robot fighting?

Now I know there’s a lot of folk gots issue with Shia LaBoeuf, but I have to say I have always found him to be perfectly likable and fine. Playing the ‘everyman’ seems to be his stock in trade and it suits him. Hell, I didn’t even dislike him in Indiana Jones and Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (car top sword fighting and ‘Tarzan’ swinging aside) and at least he had the stones enough to apologise for it. But man, is he ever dislikeable in this movie. The first half of it is gruelling. Sam Witwicky is just totally whiny and unlikeable and a bit of an all around cunt. I mainly just wanted him to get killed!

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley plays Sam’s new girlfriend Carly. How bad do you think a dim, plummy, English, model turned actress making her debut in a Michael Bay film is going to be? Yes, you’re right. She is THAT bad! She hardly defies expectation but she is still simply bloody awful. She makes Megan Fox look like Oscar material.

Other cast members fare no better. I once read an interview with John Turturro where he talked about turning down a part in The Sopranos, as he looked down his nose at it and spoke as if was beneath him. But just LOOK at what he’s doing now! He returns once again, with his sole undertaking being to stink the movie up! He’s not the only fine actor to have fallen from grace here either. Remember when John Malkovich being in a film used to be a sign of quality? No, me neither. It was sooo long ago. He appears here as Sam’s orange-tanned boss, play fighting with Autobots for comedy pratfalls. The man chronically embarrasses himself. It’s a real shame, is what it is.

Frances McDormand, of all people, shows up as the head of the NSA. McDormand couldn’t turn in a bad performance if she tried. It is simply impossible for her to be anything other than awesome. Leonard Nimoy appears too as the voice of Sentinal Prime and I can’t bring myself to say a bad word about him either. He could have done the whole thing reciting his ‘Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’ and I would still love him.

Alan Tyduk turns up for a bit as Turturro’s bodyguard, and yet another good actor is wasted in a dumbfuck comedy sidekick role, as the whole thing threatens to go completely off the rails and go belly up in a big fat bloated mess.

But then the Decepticons attack Chicago! And Boy Howdy, Bay delivers on the set pieces. In 3D, Bay has slowed down the action, so you have Autobots and Decepticons and flying shrapnel floating tantalisingly above your head in the cinema. It allows you to finally comprehend what the bloody hell is going on in his massively complex robot scraps. And it works so much better for it. There’s a great sequence where Sam is riding in Bumblebee, and Bumblebee transforms from robot, to car, and back to robot while Sam is inside! The fighting has a great clarity when it is slowed down and the assault on the Chicago cityscape is thrilling in its grandiose destruction.

It was fantastic also, to see the appearance of Shockwave! Now when I was but a young lad I used to read Transformers comic rabidly, and on one life defining day I opened the new issue whilst standing in Salmon’s Newsagent, to discover they had printed a letter I had written to them! My enquiring 8 year old mind had written demanding to know how Shockwave could have beaten Megatron in a fight for leadership of the Decepticons, if Megatron was the acknowledged ‘strongest Decepticon’. The answer, of course, was that Megatron had at the time been poisoned by Shockwave with a corrosive fuel allowing Shockwave to narrowly win the fight (this, incidentally, is why Transformers BELONGS TO ME, and not Michael Bay!). Thusly when I first clapped eyes on the mighty Shockwave in this movie there was a total party in my pants. He was awesome.

The action was exactly what you want from this. Total Bay-hem. The building attack sequence with a gigantic Decepticon worm, and the giddy, flight suit set piece were a lot of fun. There is enjoyment to be had here, especially in the second half. Overall though I feel Transformers 3 was decent, but the worst of the three. It had better action, but worse acting. The slow-mo 3D robot beat downs were rather grand in towering Imax 3D, but still, the law of diminishing returns always applies.

IMDB: Transformers : Dark Of The Moon