Transformers: Dark of the Moon [Review by Parsi]

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is ridiculous.  Let’s dispense with the good stuff.  The film was shot in 3D rather than having the effects added post-production.  The result is a pretty rich visual field.  The movie also has a pretty stellar cast, including a supporting lineup of Frances McDormand, John Turturro, John Malkovich, Ken Jeong, and Leonard Nimoy.  Ken Jeong is particularly good.  He really steals his scenes with great intensity and a keen sense of comedic timing.  A bunch of stuff blows up, no really, a ton of things, like all of Chicago.  So, there is the mega blockbuster summer super movie quality to it, for what it is worth.  Yes, this will be enough for some people.  But, the problem with Transformers is that there is nothing holding all these elements together.  There is just a bunch of stuff thrown at you, with the hopes that that will be enough.  It is not.

I remember being pretty excited about the first Transformers movie, namely because I grew up watching the cartoons.  There was a sense of nostalgia in it for me.  I was geeked out by the little references in the original film to the old cartoons.  But, at the end of the day the film was pretty hollow.  I could not even stomach the second film, it looked terrible.  I wish I had stayed away from the third.  The highlight was getting to watch it with Jon Voight. That was pretty sweet.

Michael Bay decided to throw in a bunch of silly robots that were clear ripoffs from other films.  There was a Slimer Decepticon that floated around and licked random stuff with no discernible reason.  There was the micro machine hybrid Johnny 5 – Robot Devil Transformer, who would crack not-so-wise.  There was the micro machine Stitchpunk from 9 Transformer.  We even had the Dreadlock brothers from Matrix Reloaded Decepticons.  They engaged in what appeared to be a shot-for-shot remake of the highway scene from the film.  The Tremors Decepticon.  Bicentenial Man meets Doc Brown Transformer.  The movie was a hodgepodge of derivative characters.

The plot was rambling and disorienting.  With a runtime that approached three hours there was plenty of time for Michael Bay to insert a ton of meaningless subplots.  The main plot hinges on so many stupid premises that I am certainly dumber for attempting to piece it together.  I do not want to ruin it for you just in case you have three extra hours lying around and you want to be visually stimulated while in a child like stupor, or cannot afford a full frontal lobotomy.

For some reason, Michael Bay wanted to brutalize the history of the space race.  The whole premise of the film is built on the space race really being about getting to a Transformer spacecraft that crashed on the moon.  I know, sometimes we have to break some historical eggs to make a movie omelet, but at least make sure that the historical rewrite comports with the world you have created within the film.  If we discovered Transformers during the moon landing, why would be surprised with their presence three decades later?  If we found their technology, why did we wait to study it until the Transformers met up with Shia LaBeouf?  Why didn’t we develop “future-tech” a little earlier?  What makes it worse is that this little historical fantasy is only relevant to the first third of the film, it then becomes entirely irrelevant.  All of this ignores the most basic problem, the whole thing is monumentally stupid.  Seriously, a giant ship crashed on the “dark side of the moon” and only the people working national security for the US and Soviets noticed and they somehow hid that from everyone for decades and really did absolutely nothing with this information.

Yes, there is a bunch of stuff blowing up.  But, you are too distracted by trying to puzzle together why any of this is going on that you cannot enjoy even this aspect of the film.

Bay also chooses to insert all of his trite movie magic into this film.  The slow motion images of the heroes walking out together, preferably with a tattered American flag in the background.  The super slow motion camera on the hot female character striding through a destroy cityscape.  The Matrix-esque dodging bullets and debris shot.  I am pretty sure Bay has just stopped caring.  He is not even interested in doing something interesting and good.  If he just throws a ton of money and explosions at it, people will watch it.  Do not buy into his trap.

I could hammer away at this junkyard of a film for about ten-thousand more words, after all there was almost three hours of this dreck.  But, what would be the point; this is a giant shiny piece of garbage.  If you like shiny, enjoy.  Otherwise, stay away.

PARSI VERDICT:  Shiny, but I still don’t like it.

See what the other half thinks: Haus’s Review.