Perhaps this goes without saying, but vomiting sucks. Whether you’re awake all night upchucking dinner or mucus or whatever else; it’s never something worth celebrating. Equally, when people state that the horribly titled Transformers: Dark of the Moon isn’t as gruesomely painful as the previous installment Revenge of the Fallen, one is only measuring the levels of gut-wrenching, wish-you-could-forget awfulness.
This latest collaboration between Michael Bay and children's toys continues to follow Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, a two-time world saver with a medal from Obama and a new girlfriend (this time played by Victoria Secret Model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), yet no job. Since his missions with the gigantic mechanic-aliens known as the Autobots are top secret, Sam’s options appear to be strictly in the mailroom. Why he can’t get a government job or attempt to become a soldier fighting alongside his big clanky friends is one of the movie’s many unanswered mysteries.
Eventually, and this is a real eventually summing up roughly an hour of exposition, Sam learns about some bizarre happenings on the moon from the 1960s in which a former Autobot leader named Sentinel Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy) crash landed along with a legendary weapon. Various double-crosses and explosions ensue and once more the good robots fight the bad ones, with the fate of the world in the balance (cue uber-generic score).
Many would argue that the Transformers movies are all about the action and complaining about the lack of intriguing plot or characters is moot. However, the same problem persists; why do these movies need to be so long? Dark of the Moon slogs its way to approximately two-and-a-half hours, with a solid sixty minute worth of terrible jokes (Sam’s mom inquiring about the size of her son’s package) and wasted acting talents with nothing to do (John Malkovich and Frances McDormand of all people slumming it here). Additionally, the old standard remains; if you don’t care about the people on screen, those goliath in stature set-pieces aren’t engaging.
Sure, Bay can stage an action scene, but he remains unable to do anything more. Late in the film, Sam, his lady-friend and the military guys (names aren’t really a requirement), flee for their lives in a skyscraper which is slowly collapsing. While watching this, one admires the execution of the stunts and the quality of the effects, but that's it. Bay presents everything so seriously, that there isn’t even the goofy charms of high-calorie cheese like Fast Five. Dark of the Moon features people and robots spouting cliché diatribes about freedom and destiny as if it were a propaganda film. There is a scene where hundreds of thousands of people are literally blown to pieces, just so one of the heroes can make an elaborate point about trust.
On top of its own problems, Dark of the Moon continues all of the missteps that have been littered through the franchise. The designs of the Transformers themselves remain busy and cluttered. The difficulty in taking down one the Decepticons still varies on the given moment, with a sniper rifle sufficient enough here, a team of soldiers blasting machineguns to no avail there. The action beats are repetitious; character A is about to die when character B saves them at the last second, replay until credits.
A Michael Bay film can continue to be summed up in a single shot that introduces Huntingon-Whiteley’s new character. A paint-by-numbers soft-rock song plays as the camera zooms (in 3D!) from below and up towards her ass, lingering in clear joy, before eventually having to reveal a head on top of that body which talks. The Bay aesthetic is ideal for teenage boys, but the rest of society’s fascination with the director can’t end soon enough. At some point, big boys need to put away their little toys.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon opens wide all across Seattle Tuesday night.
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