The biggest
problem with Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a
fundamental one - Hollywood, as a seeming template for the
future of film, has tried to create a film developed from a
child’s toy but intended for an audience of adults. I can
only imagine that somewhere in the mix of all the
pre-production and production meetings someone, some
dull-minded idealist, still clung to the idea that a child
should love these films and offered, “Lets make it more
silly.” And who else to bring to the screen a child’s toy
wet dream of battling robots but the perpetual adolescent
himself (unchecked now without the guiding influence of
Jerry Bruckheimer) Michael Bay? Thus a film made for
children but aimed to satisfy the more base urges (skin and
violence) of the less discerning film-viewer placed in the
hands of a 50-ish man-child starts on what one might refer
to as wrong foot. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is,
I must admit, the strongest of the films (this being said
without ever even having a glimmer of an urge to see
Transformers 2), but still dallies in the footsteps of its
predecessors. The film attempts to inject a certain sense of
darkness in the proceedings, but the sillier elements
clearly siphoned in from the more childlike roots of the
franchise, hamstring it again and again.
Movie Review - Transformers: Dark Of The Moon
If the first
Transformers film was about succeeding in high school,
and the second about succeeding in college, the third is
about the insecurities of succeeding in the real world. Our
protagonist, the affable Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf), has
graduated from college and has taken up residence in
Washington D.C. with his robotically attractive new
girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Witwicky can’t
find a job and the weight of saving the world twice and
still being unemployed rest heavy on his shoulders.
Elsewhere in the world, the United States government as
discovered the existence of another Transformers craft on
the Moon - one that holds great power and great destruction.
To cut to the chase, the big Moon craft gets tapped, the
Decepticons get all jazzed up and Chicago gets the shit
blown out of it by an alien force. Along the way Sam
Witwicky has to gather the band back together to save he
human race with the help of a couple of car robots called
the Transformers.
This seems, as all the films have, like an easy home run for
an action director with the funds and global destruction
scale Michael Bay does, but he swings wide and barely makes
contact. The film putts along for the first two hours,
developing Sam’s life in D.C. and his girlfriend’s life and
the bad guys and then more bad guys and then even more bad
guys, all the while entirely skimping on the whole reason we
dropped by the old cinema to see a film about robots
fighting robots - robots fighting robots. Bay, for whatever
reason, has deigned fit for his third film to almost
entirely remove the Transformers of the title from the film.
Oh yes, we see Optimus Prime and we see the new guy Sentinel
Prime and the Decepticons (all shit-kicked and nasty
looking) pop up once in a while, but for the most part this
is an all human show. Michael Bay, all I want from you is to
put together a two hour film that features nothing but
robots smashing the hell out of each other. I need a bare
minimum plot (which you still manage to succeed at
presenting) and then just robots, turning in to cars and
other vehicles, while blowing each other up. And it
surprises me that the man behind Bad Boys 2 fails so
hard at this. He’s crippled by an innate need to push his
characters to the verge of slapstick, both human and robot
alike, but he can’t resist the big cheesy moments with
sun-flares tempering the light and an ultra-closeup of a
grit-stained face. It doesn’t match and it doesn’t work and
the film feels like Michael Bay-light because of it.
Worse off the continued lack of any sort of character
development for the robotic element of the story continues.
The Autobots and the Decepticons are defined visually and by
the sound of their voices and it completely strips away the
cloying sentimentality Bay tries to force on to many of
their moments. They are, quite frankly, attractive set
dressings that occasionally talk and kill each other. This
is the flaw at the very bottom of the Transformer pool:
Hollywood can’t abide to make a big sci-fi film without a
strong human presence, because that’s what they believe we
connect to. Pixar proved it with WALL-E though, all
we need is solid character development and we can connect to
anything. Transformers: Dark of the Moon spends too
much time with its one note human characters and the awesome
robots of the title become side-players, means to a
destructive end.
- Noah Sanders
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