Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a monstrous waste of time. I’ve never witnessed something that had so much, and yet so little, going on. For over two and a half hours this film hammers your senses with extra precision given the 3D glasses and you come out the other side extra pissed off.
The funny thing is, there’s a collection of great ideas in this film a secret side to the Apollo moon missions and a showdown at the abandoned Chernobyl site are two examples but Transformers: Dark of the Moon feels like it was written by a bunch of kids who let their imagination run wild but never actually considered how to join the dots. Besides that, there’s about four times the number of characters required in a typical screenplay, and virtually none of them get developed in any real way.
The basic plot revolves around the ever hopped-up Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf, increasingly annoying) and his attempts to find a run of the mill job. Tricky, when you’re resume is stamped ‘Top Secret’. Meanwhile, his old buddies, the Autobots, have been working in counterterrorism for the US government, their activities unknown to all but those at the very top. Witwicky and the Transformers are brought together again, however, when a mission to an Autobot lunar crash site turns out to be not all it seems. As usual, Megatron and his halfwitted Decepticons are behind it all.
That’s pretty much all you need to know. In fact, I may have given too much away, simply because the setup is all there is to this film there’s hardly anything else except for a depressingly obvious twist and the reveal of the Decepticons’ big plan. So rolls two and quarter hours of the central protagonists and antagonists circling each other, before they finally meet in a quick series of under whelming battle scenes.
One of the most frustrating things about the Michael Bay Transformers films has been their neglect of what made the comic and cartoon series so special in the first place: character. The original imbued the Autbots and Decepticons with personality and their own politics the humans in the story watched mostly from the sidelines.
But director Bay, screenwriter Ehren Kruger and the large team of producers involved in these projects simply seem not to either trust the audience to get involved with the robots, or trust themselves to tell the story properly. We therefore get this multitude of humans, most of whom simply don’t make sense as proper characters, whether they’re ham-jobs or not. Optimus Prime, the real star of these films, once again goes missing for large tracts of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and it’s a much weaker experience because of it.
Bay’s reached a point in his career where he’s obviously surrounded by yes-men, and he needs someone to pull him into line. Much like somebody once told James Cameron that he needed to lose a reel from Aliens: he managed it, and the film was much better as a result. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a grandiose yet vague attempt at entertainment. Cameron himself copped a bit of flak for Avatar, and right so, but at least the guy’s a storyteller he knows to go into production with the basics covered. Bay, on the other hand, is an empty stylist. Don’t see Transformers: Dark of the Moon you’ll hate yourself afterwards.
I say:
If these films were made with an eye for budget and storytelling they’d be much better. As it is, they’re a collection of good ideas strung together in the most frustrating and boorish way possible.
See it for:
This actually starts reasonably well, so let’s say the first 20 minutes.
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