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.
