The Transformers movies continue to be about a warring race of robotic alien creatures and how their ancient, intergalactic battles manage to repeatedly intersect with the lives of a spastic young man named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his ridiculously good looking but blank-faced girlfriends. This is the third film in the series, which have all been directed by Michael Bay, and have all been identifiable by their showy but indecipherable action sequences and their lame, embarrassing attempts at humor. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is largely the same as the first two in these regards, but less so. Some of the lame humor gets mixed in with gags that actually hit. The action sequences aren’t choreographed with the skill of a Buster Keaton or a Steven Spielberg, but they can at least be followed. Perhaps hell has frozen over, but Dark of the Moon is actually the first case of Michael Bay making a movie that I don’t find completely unwatchable since maybe… The Rock?
Giving a real plot synopsis for a Transformers movie seems dumb, but let’s do a bit anyway. The Autobots and the Decepticons are still at war, that’s nothing new. What is new is the character of Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy). He was the leader of the Autobots before Optimus, and a great inventor. As a matter of fact, he made a device capable of teleporting nearly anything across the galaxy in an instant, which could be a game changer in an intergalactic war. Unfortunately for the Autobots, he crash-landed on our moon with his doohickey some time ago. As a matter of fact, that’s what our entire space race was secretly about; being the first country to get up there and see what sort of crazy spaceship crash landed on the moon. Most of what we see here involves the struggle between the Autobots and the Decepticons to bring Sentinel back to life, reassemble his machine, and either use it or not use it to destroy the Earth. Also, Sam Witwicky is once again inexplicably involved.
But this time Shia LaBeouf’s character doesn’t just randomly stumble into the action like before. This time we get a bit of a story arc for him. He’s restless living a civilian life; he wants to do important things. And when more alien war starts breaking out, he throws himself right into the middle of it. It’s nice to see the effort to develop the character, but I never quite bought it. In LaBeouf’s hands Sam is still a hammy, frantic goon. And the only difference between young Sam and adult Sam is that instead of frantically panicking at everything, he’s now energetically puffing his chest out at it like a live action Scrappy-Doo. I can’t decide which version of the character is more annoying. Another difference in Sam’s life is that he has a new girlfriend named Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whitely). When she is introduced it is through a close-up shot of her panty-clad posterior. Instantly it’s clear that Bay is going to give this underwear model just about as much to work with as he did Megan Fox, so I’ll just move on without further dissecting Huntington-Whitely’s involvement.
While Leonard Nimoy’s admittedly pretty cool portrayal of Sentinel Prime is the only robotic addition to the cast worth mentioning, we do get a bevy of new human characters. They’re mostly used to bring us more of that trademark Michael Bay humor. John Malkovich shows up looking like Larry King and playing a ridiculous, goofy character that had no bearing on the film’s story that I can discern. Ken Jeong shows up for about ten minutes of stupid, head scratching insanity that also seemed like it had very little to do with the rest of the film. And Frances McDormand shows up slumming it as a stuffy intelligence agent with a handbag obsession. Joining them in giving baffling, comedically poisonous performances are a few Transformers standbys. Kevin Dunn and Julie White reappear as Sam’s painfully unfunny parents, and John Turturro reappears as the obnoxiously stupid Agent Simmons. There are huge chunks of this film that you could use to explain the concept of unfunny to an alien who had never been exposed to humor. But then there’s Alan Tudyk. Tudyk plays a German assistant to Turturro’s character named Dutch, and he absolutely kills it. Every scene that he’s in, every line that he reads, Tudyk absolutely nails. He’s hysterical in this movie, this Michael Bay movie. I have no idea how that happened, but I will be eternally grateful for the relief it brought.
Visually this film is astounding. Clearly, the process of creating the 3D environment was meticulously paid attention to, and this is the first movie that I would recommend you watch the 3D version of since Avatar. And in addition to the fact that the 3D effects actually work to add to the film’s presentation, working with the 3D camera rigs seems to have had a very welcome reigning in effect on Bay’s visual style as well. This is still a Bay movie, the camera never quite stops moving, but it’s no longer furiously spinning around its subjects. The editing is hugely improved compared to Bay’s past work. By crafting this film in 3D, Bay seems to have had to spend more time picking his angles instead of just shooting every scene from one million different points of view and then creating a frantic patchwork of no more than a second or two from each shot to construct a sequence. The action scenes here aren’t perfect, but they avoid looking like documentary footage of a tornado moving through a scrap yard like the first two films did.
The main problem this film has is that it’s just way too long. We spend so much time following around Sam, his relationship, and his stupid attempts at getting a job; and none of it adds up to anything. Sam’s life isn’t even played with any weight, it’s all just excuses to shoe horn in slapstick non-humor. And probably cutting out all of the slow motion, dramatic reaction shots that Bay is so fond of could have knocked a half hour off of the run time all by itself. But once you wade through all of that and get to the third act, you’re treated to about an hour straight of some of the biggest, boldest action stuff that I’ve ever seen. The entire last hour of this film is basically the robot war Terminator movie that everyone always wanted but never got because Salvation was so terrible. We watch as hundreds of robots do battle in downtown Chicago, systematically laying waste to the whole city, and it’s jaw dropping in its scale. There’s a scene where Sam and company are in a tumbling skyscraper that tops even Elizabeth Shue’s Adventures in Babysitting climb down the Smurfit-Stone Building when it comes to Chicago-based thrills. There’s a scene where soldiers wearing winged, flying squirrel suits sky dive into the middle of the city with 3D cameras strapped to their heads that may just top Swayze and Keanu plummeting to the Earth with one chute in Point Break. I don’t want to use a cliché like “worth the price of admission”, but the last act of this film is probably just that because of pure spectacle alone. If you’re going to see it, see it in 3D, see it on the big screen, and then write letters to casting agents praising Alan Tudyk afterwards.
