Big and shiny, but not much substance...

Rating: 4/10 (6 July 2011)

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is one of those quintessential action-fantasy-flicks that unfortunately lacks any semblance of a decent script. Now, before I get pelted with tomatoes for having the audacity to criticize what is basically the biggest blockbuster this summer, let me share some of my woes. Case and point: the resounding screech of metal against metal and the peppered pops of semi-automatic weapons are still ringing in my ears, but I cannot remember a single freaking' thing that ANY of the characters, flesh-born or computerized, said during entire three-hour long feature. Not a single one-liner. Nary a pithy comment about how we as a human race have to survive to fight one more day. Come on, man! No inspirational speech on the eve of apocalyptic genocide? Have writers learned nothing from the success of 'Independence Day,' 'Terminator,' or '300'? The premise is simple: before the destruction of the Autobots' home planet of Cybertron, a single ship containing a contingency survival plan for the inhabitants of the planet managed to escape and marooned itself on the Earth's moon. The space race of the mid-sixties was supposedly an attempt to retrieve classified intelligence on the nature of the crash material, and in the pursuit of this knowledge it is discovered that Decepticons and humans have been plotting this entire time to keep an important secret, cloaked by the dark of the moon, from falling into the hands of the Autobots and their allies.
I am not a hater, people. I grew up teething on the plastic wing-dings of Optimus Prime and Starscream myself, and if there was anyone out there rooting for this flick, it was me. But...it was a hot mess, baby. Not in terms of action -- it's categorically impossible for a Michael Bay movie to lack in visual stimuli -- but it just reeked from the lack of character development when it came to the story line and the acting. When did Sam Witwicky become such an angry little fellow anyway? He's almost shrill, and he needs to take anger-management courses. Shia LeBeouf is becoming one of those Joe Pesci types of actors that always end up yelling and pacing and angrily hitting things on-screen just to make a point. And Ken Jeong was the scariest caricature of an Asian corporate douche if I saw one. He needs to take a Xanax and call Paramount in the morning. The whole schizo-multiple personalities thing is so done. What I wouldn't give to see Ken Jeong being funny, instead of desperate.
Oh, and the model was ridiculous. This is a point that bears repeating: on behalf of bewildered women everywhere, the presence of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Sam's devoted girlfriend was just plain RIDICULOUS. A walking, talking Pantene commercial in the middle of Cybertronic war? What were you thinking, Michael Bay? Yes, she was freakishly long-legged and gorgeous -- but dude, there is a time and place for that type of vapid sultriness, and the eve of destruction is not it! If I were angry little Sam, I would have instantly hooked up with Frances MacDonald's powerful CIA operative character, because at least she's tough and wears sneakers and I wanna LIVE, dammit, and she has the greatest likelihood of making it out alive. Heck, even Megan Fox seemed like she could take a punch if necessary. This new Barbie-doll looked like her shin was gonna snap in half if a shard of glass fell on it (which incidentally she somehow managed to avoid, despite falling out of a damn skyscraper).
In summary, the film's three hours of non-narrative battle footage in which machines are burned, wrecked, and incinerated was just a bit too much for me to handle without the occasional glimpse into the depths of humanity. The few scenes of comrades sacrificing their lives for one another and of the military forces tirelessly re-engaging the enemy despite certain defeat just didn't have the same gravitas, due to sensation overload. Wanna know the reason news channels don't just film actual war zones for hours and replay them without editing or injecting some sort of human interest story? It desensitizes us, folks. Deadens our brains. We begin to feel ambivalent about the outcome. I stopped caring what would happen to Sam Witwicky and his ridiculously attired model-cum-political attaché girlfriend (four-inch platforms while running for your life down Wacker Drive? Really?) less than an hour and a half into the film, and the yawns punctuating the theater during the last battle scene clued me into the fact that I wasn't the only one shifting restlessly in my seat from boredom.
The scenes that really took my breath away actually had nothing to do with the Autobots or Decepticons. The audience got to see some truly awesome scenes of men (not machines) deploying from carrier planes and sailing between the skyscrapers like flying squirrels in the rain-forest. The film tempts you with the trailer of a swiftly tilting skyscraper and people scrabbling like gerbils to keep their footing... maybe it was the green-screen affecting the acting chops, but it should have engendered more feelings of tension and suspense in the audience. The chemistry was off somehow -- what should have been a nail-biter was mostly just exhausting to watch.
Go see this movie if you have a few hours to burn, but don't feel like being bogged down by a creative storyline. Just focus on the incessant clanging and gnashing of metal belonging to Autobots and Decepticons alike as they transform like they're on steroids -- a buddy of mine mentioned why they kept transforming so much, since the beloved toys of youth consisted of one, two, three, maybe four twists before yielding Optimus or Bumblebee. It was the original beauty of an Autobot -- the balance of form and function. Take that, Michael Bay.