Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) – AMK Hub. The Internet Critics haven’t been kind on Michael Bay’s Transformers 3. It’s been almost universally panned to be an incoherent mess. The funniest thing though is that my 11 year old nephew told me out loud the weekend before last not to believe all those reviews, and that it was, instead, an “amazingly good film”.
One viewing later; I’m going to have to agree with all those critics. Dark of the Moon is loud, chaotic, incomprehensible, and the work from a director who cares only to make the films he wants and who couldn’t care less about what in reality works in films. Aside from the high visual production values and that that you again get to see big robots plummeting each other, the story has no logic, the film warps your sense of time and distance, the human characters still can’t act, and you still can’t make head or tail of the action scenes. And for the first time ever even, watching a Transformers film gave me a migraine.
The basic plot outlay in the latest turd of a film is exactly the same as the second that was itself a retread of the first. Again, a doomsday Transformers device which long has been buried has been discovered, and again, it’s a race between the Autobots and the Decepticons to get to it first! When I saw the outlay revealed in early previews of this film, I groaned and wondered how many times this tired plot device of having some secret and buried and just discovered weapon that can kill everyone/everything can be used.
Even the plot points are recycled. The Autobots are gonna get smacked down midway that all seems lost, and it will all follow into an disorganized and overly long battle in some desert or city, culminating again in a final big fight where Optimus Prime goes mano-a-mano with Megatron.
Like before, the humans are sidelined onscreen by the computer-generated robots. Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky still screams and yells a lot, and despite having been given presidential medals can’t hold a job. He’s got Carly, a hot new girl friend who’s ex-Victoria’s Secret, after his last one, Megan Fox, got tossed from the cast line-up after apparently calling the director a Hitler or something. The new female hotness acts even more poorly than Fox, but Bay compensates us with the usual gratuitous shots of her cleavage and even a couple of fleeting and almost naughty shots of her undies.
And in the third outing, Bay’s roped in new human actors for the farce. There’s Leonard Nimoy, John Malkovich, Patrick ‘McDreamy’ Dempsey, and Frances McDormand. And these are proven actors but are given caricature-like roles. At least Malkovich looks like he’s having lots of fun. Maybe he knows he’s in a ridiculous story so is determined to at least enjoy himself. But the latter two look like they were taking their one-note roles seriously!
The most awesomely stupid moment in the film goes to that scene where Carly is shot in slo-mo staring into the distance experiencing an epiphany while surrounded by battle chaos. And that epiphany involves her going on to tell Megatron that he shouldn’t be someone else’s bitch [sic]. Yep; the Leader of all that’s Evil listening to this bimbo instead of squashing her like he’s done with every other human. Believe it!
Apparently this is going to be Michael Bay’s last outing in the Transformers’ franchise, and thankfully if that’s true. But as for this one, Dark of the Moon rates a solid…
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