Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Move over Green Lantern because Transformers: Dark of the Moon has taken the title of worst blockbuster of the year from you.  I was never a fan of the previous Transformers, so maybe I’m not unbiased enough to judge this one, but this really is the personification of everything that I don’t like in movies.  This was more than 2 hours of an excuse to have special effects and loud ‘Boom’ noises.  The movie had no coherent plot, nor characters we could care for.  I wish I could go back and have done something more constructive with my day, but it’s too late.

The Director Michael Bay is a rich man and this type of film making has made him one, so I mainly blame the viewing public for keeping him employed.  His background is music videos and it shows.  Much like videos, his movies are all style and visual candy with no substance.  He makes me appreciate someone like James Cameron, who can create a blockbuster with intelligence and substance, that much more.   What’s even more frustrating is that this film contains a huge amount of talented actors who are utterly wasted in this pointless movie.  Hollywood execs think the more star power the better the movie, but the opposite is proven time and time again.  With rare exceptions like ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, multi star movies invariably disappoint.

Surprisingly enough, the pre-credit scene actually piqued my hopes.  The basis of the whole movie was that an alien crash landing on the moon in 1961 is what  really sparked the space race of the 1960’s.  America was the first to the moon and discovered the secrets of the Transformers first (what conspiracy fanatic wouldn’t love that premise).  As soon as the opening credits ended, the whole movie went downhill.  The movie was 2 hours of random fight scenes that were an excuse for cool morphing effects.  Humans definitely seemed to be doing things at a frantic pace, but nothing they did ever made the slightest difference, so I’m not sure what the point was.  

Shia LeBoeuf reprises his role as Sam Witwicky and provides nothing to the story other than manically running around.  It appears he has attended the William Shatner school of over acting, but even Shatner would tell him to “Calm down”.  He runs around like a coke addled maniac, yelling things at Transformers that are obviously too far away to hear.  Super stunner Megan Fox is replaced by super stunner Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.  Sam does rather well with women for a short hyperactive teenager who works in a mail room.  Rosie is so far out of Shia’s league that it is distracting.  The chemistry and acting is wooden (she is a Victoria Secret’s model after all) and her primary job is walking around looking good (in that respect, she succeeds).  We are meant to believe that Sam is her true love, when she is being wooed by an extremely rich and successful Patrick Dempsey, who gives her a $200,000 Mercedes (talk about science fiction).

Like I said earlier, there was a lot of great talent in this film, most of whom were wasted in their cartoony roles.  The great Frances McDormund plays her Security Director role comedically, I think.  I felt they were going for laughs, but I never smiled once at anything she said or did.  John Malkovich was just collecting a paycheck (I can respect that on occasion).  In bad comedies or dramas, they throw in gratuitous sex scenes to try and keep the audience interested.  In bad blockbusters, they throw in gratuitous comedy to provoke some reaction from the audience.  Usually, I am against this practice, but the gratuitous comedic scenes from Ken Jeong and John Turturro were really the only scenes I enjoyed in this movie.  Ken Jeong, playing  the conspiracy minded corporate exec; Jerry Wang, is fast becoming one of my favorite comedic actors and his short scenes in this film were the most memorable thing about it.  The guy plays over the top better than anyone.  

The plot (what little there was) involved the evil Decepticons planning to take over the Earth (isn’t that always the plot) and the noble Autobots trying to stop them.  This time we are introduced to the addition of Optimus Prime’s mentor; Sentinal (voiced by Lenard Nimoy [they even squeeze him saying; ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’ to please all of the Star Trek geeks]).  The plan this time was to bring the Transformer home world to Earth.  I’m not sure why they needed to bring their whole planet to Earth, but it made for bigger special effects.  Downtown Chicago is randomly chosen as ground zero for the final battle for the fate of the planet.  Most of the fighting was held at the corner of Michigan and Wacker.  Not sure why this locale was picked, but I liked seeing my home on the big movie screen, so no further analysis from me on that.

All the other characters, human and Transformer alike, were one-dimensional cartoonish characters and extremely replaceable and interchangeable.  I was finally able to tell the good ones from the bad ones half way into the film as the good guys had colors in their armor where the evil ones were all metallic grey.  I will say, I wish they would have given more screen time to Tyrese Gibson.  He reprises his role as Special Forces soldier; Epps.   I hope that guy gets his own big budget action movie soon (I know he’s starred in some low budget ones), because he just screams ‘Action Star’.   

Because this is a special effects mega movie, it will make money and careers will be enhanced and Michael Bay will be encouraged to make even more movies like this.  All I can say is that this type of movie is a genre that I dislike intensely in American movie making.  You can have blockbusters, but have some depth to it (Avatar).  This had all of the depth of one of Bay’s music videos and I wished it would have lasted as long as one.

I rate this movie * star  (and only because of Jeong and Tuturro)