Exceeded My Expectations

Rating: 8/10 (29 June 2011)

To say my expectations going into Transformers: Dark of the Moon were low would be a tremendous understatement. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was so embarrassingly bad I could hardly fathom it; but I ended up going to the new movie against my better judgement, primarily because I wanted to see the trailer for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol up on the big screen (which did not disappoint by the way, Brad Bird's live action debut looks amazing). To my surprise, though, Dark of the Moon was not terrible, and all things considered was actually pretty good.
So when it comes to critiquing a Michael Bay film, you can't really treat it like anything else. There's a certain level of expectation that comes with one of his movies, and that involves a lot of explosions, and not a lot of plot. And when it comes to explosions, giant robots, and epic action sequences, this movie does not disappoint, however, for a Michael Bay film, Dark of the Moon is surprisingly talky and I'm still not sure whether or not that's a good thing. The first two acts of the film contain relatively few big action set pieces, and mostly attempts to set the stage for everything that happens in the film's final act. On one hand I appreciate that this film actually attempts to tell a story rather than Revenge of the Fallen's method of "look, here's robots fighting in China for no reason! Ooh, and now they're fighting in Egypt for no reason!" but on the other hand the film kind of drags at times in the first two acts because none of the characters are particularly compelling. Normally I would not criticize a film for spending more time on story and characters than on eye candy, and I do commend the filmmakers for telling a coherent story this time around, but they could have easily trimmed some time from the first two acts and focused more on the battle for Earth between the Autobots and Decepticons.
When we finally do get to the good stuff in the final act, the action and the scale is certainly epic, but parts of it feel hollow. What we're seeing is cool, but none of it carries any weight; what should be a rousing finale to a series rings a bit flat because there was not a proper build up to it. Yes, this movie spent a long time setting up the finale, and they did it as well as they could, but for the kind of impact they were clearly going for the series needs to build up to it from the get go. This is my biggest problem with the film, it's not the shallow characters, the massive plot holes, or the annoying comic relief characters; those are all par for the course with a movie like this. My biggest complaint is that Transformers did not have the ambition or the foresight to build any sort of arc into the trilogy. Almost nothing from the first two films has any impact on the events of this film (the second film is particularly overlooked). This does not feel like Transformers 3, it feels like Transformers: Yeah, We Did Another One. When you make a trilogy like this, it's essential to have a narrative that ties them together. The reason Return of the King is so powerful as a conclusion because the rest of The Lord of the Rings builds up to it, the same goes for the Star Wars trilogy, even the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy creates an arc for its story and its characters so that the ending feels like the culmination of everything, not just another ending of another movie. In my opinion, that is the biggest area where Transformers: Dark of the Moon fails, that it does not build on any established narrative, but instead goes in an entirely new direction and therefore feels less satisfying than it could have. Again, though, this is Michael Bay's Transformers, so to expect that kind of foresight to go into it is a bit silly. So let's shift gears and focus on some things I did like.
This movie, has far less embarrassingly juvenile humor than either of the previous films (THANK GOD!). Oh, there's still some in there, but we don't have anything as facepalm worthy as masturbation jokes, Bumblebee peeing on John Turturro, Mudflap and Skids, or "I'm underneath the enemy's...scrotum." Outside of the juvenile humor though, there are some things are actually legitimately funny John Malkovich has a fun, albeit brief, role in the film, and Shia LeBeouf has some great interaction with a character played by Patrick Dempsey. I was also impressed that there were one or two plot twists in this film that actually managed to surprise me. It was nothing super heady, but the script was at least intelligent enough to keep you on your toes, even if just a little bit. And of course the visual effects work by ILM was amazing, and is a shoe-in for the VFX Oscar this year.
So all in all Transformers: Dark of the Moon was an enjoyable film. It vastly exceeded my expectations based on what we got with the last film, and while not as satisfying as it could have been still had plenty of cool action sequences and fun moments. If you liked the first Transformers at all I would recommend it, if not, than this isn't going to change your opinion on the series at all.
B-