“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is a mind-numbing, relentless, annoying, incoherent, bloated and overall poorly made film that only surpasses the abominable first sequel to this franchise possibly for the reason that it is less racist. This series’ enduring popularity is evidence that the blockbuster crowd has become no less robotic and drone like than the monstrosities on screen.
Michael Bay’s second “Transformers” film, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” left me immensely angry, with myself for having sat through it, with so many others for having enjoyed it and with Bay for having ever made it. I had never seen a film as long or as overstuffed, and it earned a place in bad movie history since.
Now here we are two years later. “Dark of the Moon” was not enraging but depressing in its repetition of the same scatterbrained sense of humor, inconceivable plot, cinematography that blatantly defied cinematic staples and worst of all, tedious, unmemorable, bombastic and endlessly long battle sequences.
Seriously, what was your favorite moment of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon?” The robot battles? The slow motion? The explosions? It’s sad to say there are quite a lot of all of those and unfortunately impossible to choose.
As the film surpasses the hour and a half mark, Bay turns his wave of destruction and final enduring hour on my hometown of Chicago. This was a welcoming thought to me and many other Chicagoans, namely for the reason I wondered if the damage to the Tribune Tower and Wacker Drive would be extensive enough to keep me from work next week.
But Bay even recycles his own mayhem. He is so obsessed with the mass of special effects at his disposal that nothing stands out, and even the novelty of seeing everyone’s favorite tourist trap Navy Pier get destroyed blends in amongst the chaos.
In a word, Bay’s belaboring of these sequences is pretentious, the kind of ad hominem attack that commonly slips into art house criticism rather than action extravaganzas.
And Bay does not merely mangle Chicago landmarks. Character development, plot exposition, comedy and the cherished history of mankind are all at his disposal.
Screenwriter Ehren Kruger accelerates us through the Apollo missions and Chernobyl and writes them off as insignificant moments in the ongoing war between the noble Autobots and the evil Decepticons.
As a side note, after three movies I am still baffled as to the purpose of this war. The robots spend eternity chasing MacGuffins to accomplish nothing, only to have us caught in the middle. The characters seem to have nothing to gain and I have no reason to care.
In fact, the robot wars now seem to accommodate none other than Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) massive ego. Sam started this franchise as a quirky nerd blessed with a universal opportunity and a supermodel of a girlfriend. Now he whines to potential employers, CIA operatives and his newly found supermodel girlfriend (non-actress and Victoria Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley replacing Megan more-than-just-a-body-and-lips Fox) that anything short of saving the world is beneath him. He’s a mean-spirited, unlikeable hero leading a cast of equally aggravating supporting humans and robots.
Before getting to the robots, the humans speak at absurd paces, laying down exposition and peculiar one-liners at lightning speeds. Yet still they seem to say so little and take so long to do so. Sam’s parents are a particularly bothersome bunch. They wonder why he isn’t more of a douche bag, flaunting his gorgeous girlfriend and state of the art car from space. Then there’s Sam’s girlfriend Carly (introduced to us from the waist down), whose job is to be sexy in white and still have perfect hair and makeup in the middle of a warzone.
I also wondered what this movie would be like if it were directed by the Coen brothers, now that it includes John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and John Turturro. Surely their characters would be given more wit than just attitude and more dimensions than just one. I particularly hated McDormand’s character, who spends the film condescending to robots with guns five times her size.
Although, I could be wrong in estimating how much bigger they are than Frances McDormand. The robots fluctuate in size and space to clutter 95 percent of any space they’re given on screen. And to help us distinguish these hulking clusters of metal, Bay has helpfully stereotyped each robot’s personality and voice.
The damn things really have to shut up. They are without mystique as heroes or villains and their dialogue is worse than robotic because they are intentionally anthropomorphized and given metallic attributes. Sure there is no “black” robot like the controversial pair in “Revenge of the Fallen,” but there is a British robot, a white-trash robot and a philosophical elder robot voiced by Leonard Nimoy.
The machines are the epitome of excess. They decapitate the Abraham Lincoln memorial and morph into hot rods and Cisco computers simply because they can. One wears a scarf while in the desert and asks that the elephants bow down to him.
And the rest of the movie is naturally no stranger to this bloating. The suspense-free battles rage on for what feel like hours. Characters babble nonsense in the hope of saying something weird enough to get a laugh. Interior sets are shimmering palaces I thought inconceivable with modern architecture. Bay’s camera looms as low to the ground as possible whenever he sees fit. What, canted angles not good enough for you anymore Bay?
I could likely transpose much of this review to the previous film, and writing that gives me just as little hope for the future of summer movies. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is a crippling benchmark for the state of film today, and it is one of many.
½ star
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