Few heroes of the big screen are as infuriatingly sanctimonious as Optimis Prime, the giant didactic robot at the ‘spiritual’ head of the Transformers movies — if such a word can be used in the context of productions known and alternately celebrated and despised for their mega-decibel action and bat out of hell stupidity — but that’s hardly surprising given blockbuster-making airhead Michael Bay never liked to do anything in half measures.
The former music video and TV advertisement director, whose work is renowned for its brain-numbing bombast, is ruler of the roost in his particular niche: cinema as a buffet of spectacle and excess served up in cumbersomely long pictures with the intellectual depth of 30 second soft drink commercials.
Life ain’t no box of chocolates for Bay’s audiences, who collectively got dumberer throughout Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001) , The Island (2005) and Transformers 1 (2007) and 2 (2009). Look at the poster for any Bay production and you know what you’re gonna get. Spectacle. Excess.
That applies double — no, triple — to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third installment in a series dedicated to dishing out the most intensely onerous big budget “entertainment” turn of the century cinema has to offer.
Shia LaBeouf reprises his role as Sam Witwicky, a Joe Shmoe boy-next-door loser who again lands himself smack bang in the middle of a war between the Autobots (good robots) and the Decepticons (bad robots).
Sam’s saved the world twice and received a medal of honor from the President but still has trouble landing a job. He’s got a sexy girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, replacing Megan Fox, who likened working with Bay to working with Hitler) but only because Michael Bay loves to probe attractive women with his cameras. The film’s first shot uses a tailor-made-for-teen-boys technique known in the industry as “ass cam.”
A screwy act one back story informs us of the real reason the US and Russia raced to get to the moon: not for the kudos but to get a piece of an ancient robot arc. One incomprehensible series of events later, the Autobots and Decepticons duke it out in downtown Chicago, with nothing less than the fate of the universe in their huge mechanical hands.
Now, here comes the kind of cut’n'paste criticism synonymous with analytical readings of Transformers: the characters are wafer-thin, the story vacuous and dull, the direction ham-fisted, the action scenes tiresomely long. All true, but Transformers: Dark of the Moon still manages to shock and bamboozle audiences with its bone-rattling heavy-handedness and Bay, true to form, delivers a catastrophically awful assault on the senses.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with cinema as spectacle, as a form of elaborate escapism. But the Transformers flicks are a blood red carpet to movie hell, the brain not so much left at the door but frogmarched inside and pulverised into small pieces.
Michael Bay once famously described his filmmaking style as “fucking the frame.” Fair call. And here’s something he ought to remember: neither the frame nor the audience will mind if, next time around, after Bay wipes the bile from his gums and zips up his trousers, he doesn’t call the next day. Or the next week. Or ever.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon’s Australian theatrical release date: June 29, 2011.
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10 Comments
God this film was awful wasn’t it? The jokes were awful, the action soulless, and there weren’t more than about three characters that I had any interest in seeing survive the film.
And yet, it’s still miles better than the last one…
I had the pleasure of seeing this film with Luke, and, if anything, he is being too kind.
Michael Bay, you’re lucky I didn’t pay to see your “movie”. Otherwise you’d owe me money.
As an avid Transformers fan when I was a kid, I should have expected this tripe considering the first two movies.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, and you better never meet me in a dark alley Bay.
P.S Where the fuck are the Dinobots! Grimlock could have saved this movie –but only if he ate every character.
The fact that movies have reached the point at which absolutely anything can be depicted perfectly at almost exactly the same time as people have forgotten how to actually write a story says something perverse about the universe.
So basically a rip-off of the back-story to the incomplete BSG fanfic, Red Banner/White Star?
I hate Michael Bay’s ‘reimagining’ of the Transformers franchise (Optimus is a cab-over, not a bloody Peterbuilt!), but I’m going to pay my $15, and I’d better bloody-well see Optimus handing out some pain, Megatron being megamaniacal, and Starscream being insane. The rest of the cast (particularly the Humans) can go hang.
Meh … a pretty fired-up review for what in the whole schem of things lived up to the advertising. By that I’m assuming that you are not complaining that you didn’t know what you were in for.
I think that there were some fantasticaly rendered CG effects and only really cringed when they wheeled out Buzz Aldrin (actually I think I had a little vom-vom at that point).
Worth the 17-odd bucks at a megaplex? No. On the big screen at your budget local (go the Balmoral!)? Yeah, why not.
Give Michael some credit!
One of his movies; The Island (2005) was quite good, until lots of stuff started exploding towards the end. It’s kind of like the projectionist accidentally played the wrong last reel.
This joke *almost* came true, see this youtube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7kcqB3thJM}
Maybe I just thought it was good due to the presence of Scarlett Johansson?
Worst… movie… ever…