Transformers: Dark side of human intellect

Rating: 3/10 (28 June 2011)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon does put me in some dilemma. To call it a movie would be gross injustice, for it is anything but, it is a sad, raucous, empty 150 minute flick that tricks you into yawning insufferably. To call it a bad movie would be no less an injustice, as it would give the bad movies a bad name. So if we agree to call it Thing, I should say that it is one terrible Thing.It is easily the worst Thing of the decade, and keeping in mind that this very decade has seen movies like its prequel, Pirates of the Caribbean IV, Twilight saga, this is saying something. There is no story, none at all. It is a pathetic excuse for a movie. The last hour is peppered with loud cacophonous dumb action, where, for all it matters, every robot is hitting every robot, and it becomes tiresome to figure which ones are the good ones, and frankly speaking, you would hardly care. The acting is pedestrian, a fine actor like John Malkovich is reduced to an absolute mockery, Shia LaBeouf, who was moderately tolerable in the first two installments, spends the first half screaming like hell, and the second half deciding whether to scream or not, and his parents, as usual, are poor comical add-ons and make you cringe. Every alternate minute, people turn up sporting a national top-secret, making you wonder since when has the US Govt started dishing out state secrets to common people. John Turturro appears out of nowhere, and bosses his way in and out of CIA, NASA, whenever he pleases, wherever he wishes, and he seems to have an awful number of people at his command, even though he is supposed to sit home sipping lemonade, as he was stripped of his power in part II.
Surprises abound, still. As if the entire US army has gone to Tahiti for snorkeling, only a dozen of people are left in Chicago to defend the city, as the future of the world lies in balance. Thousands and thousands of spaceships materialize from thin air, and instead of attacking the rest of the world, which would have been much easier, given they don't have Autobots to protect them, attack poor old Chicago, and keeps on attacking it only. Actors find time to exchange romantic truisms in the midst of the war, even when a missile is cruising towards them. A clichéd word of wisdom is enough to turn one Decepticon against another, that too when the latter is about to kill an Autobot.
The dialogs are so inane and trite, that one might strongly suspect whether there was any script at all. The action is stale and raucous, an unending pain-in-the-ass litany of gunshots and missile blasts, a motley influence of too many Fast and the Furious movies, and it's time that directors understand that having the latest CGI graphics and special effects at their disposal and cramming them in any possible combination does NOT a good action film make. Perhaps they will never understand. Perhaps that is why the Spielbergs and Camerons will always belong to an elusive class.
And of course a review of the Thing would be incomplete without a mention of its lead "actress" Rosie Huntington Whiteley. Yes, you heard it right, she does make Megan Fox's acting look like Ingrid Bergman's! She happens to be the latest addition to a slew of models who have made a foray into acting, trying to parlay their success as a model into celluloid. She looks reasonably tolerable when she keeps mum, and indeed looks hot in progressively lesser and lesser amount of attire, but the moment she opens her mouth the entire effect is ruined, and an already poor scene is made even worse. Not only does she sound dumb, her trying to buy off the audience with daredevil clothes, as if her 'hotness' can buy her a purchase on acting skills, cannot but appear condescending, and after some time, quite tiring. It's high time that directors (and most importantly the models themselves) understand that acting and modelling are mutually exclusive sets, and excelling in the former doesn't necessarily make her good (or even tolerable) in the latter, so that we, the audience, are spared some horribly wooden acting. Amen.