Cinema 2011 #64: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is blockbuster cinema at its worst. It’s a lifeless film with a convoluted plot laboured for a punishingly tedious runtime, populated by forgettable characters whose names you won’t remember and a convoy of alien robotic cars that are, for the most part, entirely indistinguishable. It’s a film in which its director, Michael Bay, believes that any scene can be improved with the presence of large explosions or large breasts, and who takes racial stereotyping to near uncomfortable levels for the sake of a laugh. It is so poorly edited that in spite of the sterling work completed by its visual effects team, it is nearly impossible to actually separate the swaying mass of pixels into identifiable characters. It’s just awful.

It’s made about half a billion dollars in a week.

The story, insofar as any Transformers film has been driven by a coherent plot, revolves once again around Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, by now an unemployed post-crash college grad bumming around Washington DC with his British girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Sam’s grown tired of living the civilian life, and pines for the days when he and his friends the Autobots, along with their leader Optimus Prime, could just keep on truckin’. Instead, he finds himself driving a floptimus prime jalopy and at the bottom of the career ladder in the mailroom of a corporation that may prove to be important to the plot.

Having realised he'd only put €2 in the parking meter, the race was on

But luck, and the needless slaughter of thousands of people, shines on Sam, and it’s not long before a hasty space-race cover-up leads to a rescue mission, which leads to another cover-up, and then it’s a hop, skip and a jump to a full-scale Decepticon invasion of Earth/the USA. Will Witwicky and Uncle Sam’s finest be able to save the rest of the world from enslavement, or will those dastardly Decepticons win these wacky races and destroy all that is American in the world/the USA?

Mostly, it’s a shame that a film that cost so much to make, and which has a cast of outstanding character actors (John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, John Turturro) and the best 3D rendering since Avatar fails so spectacularly. LaBeouf is fine as Sam, and carries off his comedic scenes with a likeable enough charm, but is probably grateful his three-picture deal is over. Huntington-Whiteley making her feature debut, granted as a character so pointless to proceedings that she should have been written out of the script in preproduction, acts as well as the seasoned professional she is and looks out of place in every scene she’s in. Ken Jeong, as a bitchy Asian noise machine, will leave you feeling like you have a hangover, and Josh Duhamel and his soulja boys do lots of running and shooting, despite the fact that that has never yet taken down a single Decepticon, even the little ones.

As for the robots… well, after three films, and 451 minutes of screen time, it still remains unclear why they’re here, why they speak like cockneys and Brooklyn Jews and what they are even good for (Optimus Prime literally gets tangled in a few wires, for about 20 minutes)?

If only Michael Bay would blow them up.

2 Likes