Not As Egregiously Awful As #2, Merely Bad

Rating: 3/10 (28 June 2011)

Transformers [3]: Dark of the Moon (2:34, PG-13, 3-D) — SF, biggie, sequel
I have the same attitude toward Autobots vs. Decepticons that I do toward vampires vs. werewolves, rats vs. cockroaches, and Baathists vs. Al-Qaeda, namely I hope you all die! Kill each other off, but please do it quickly, quietly, and far far away from here. Unfortunately, in Transformers 3 they take forever (over 2.5 hours), it's noisy, it's in a theater near you, and there are still some left standing when it's all over.
The original Transformers wasn't all bad; I gave it a 5 (average). The sequel was aggressively, unrelentingly obnoxious and loud loud loud loud; it got a 2 (awful). This one edges up a notch to 3 (bad). Why is that? Because the 1st 9 minutes recreated the greatest moment in human history, when we took only a decade from decision to footfall on a trip to the Moon. There's original footage from the 1960s plus a modern-day cameo appearance by Buzz Aldrin.
But why did we go to the Moon? The movie starts off with an intriguing premise: that we were aware that an alien spacecraft had crashed in the Sea of Tranquility, and we wanted to go up and get a good look at it. Aldrin and Neil Armstrong (who were never on the far side of the Moon, regardless of the title or what screenwriter Ehren Krueger has his characters claim) supposedly discovered a huge alien robot there. This turns out to be Sentinel Prime, master strategist of the Autobots, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Severely damaged, he had fled the Transformer homeworld of Cybertron after his last-ditch effort to win the final robot war ended in defeat. But he's inert in 1969, and it isn't until the present day that the Earthly Autobots head back to reactivate him, bringing along their own version of the Energizer Bunny.
That's the high point of the movie. After that, it's all downhill, as director Michael Bay and the various special-effects teams take over. As before, there's lots of whirling hardware, dust, spurting oil, blazing guns, and explosions. Once again it's impossible to keep track of who's who, even if you had a clue in the 1st place, which the movie never bothers to provide. Dweebish protagonist Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) tries to pretend that human beings in general and he in particular have a role to play in the intra-robot conflict, but it's abundantly clear that they're mainly cannon fodder. He's accompanied thru much of the carnage by eye- candy girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), whose job is to dress in saran wrap and adopt whatever emotional attitude the screenplay requires at any given moment.
The tone of the human interactions is saucy and insincere, played broadly and cartoonishly. Oddly, the actual cartoon characters, the robots, are the ones with the serious dialog and motivations. This is at least consistent with the movie's general attitude that they're the only ones worth caring about.
Other actors who collected a paycheck for walking thru this junkyard-in-progress include Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, Patrick Dempsey, Alan Tudyk, and John Malkovich. Their talents range from decent to excellent, but in all cases are superfluous here.
The Decepticons convincingly devastate an odd version of Chicago that includes the Milwaukee Art Museum. The survival of our heroes against all odds is not even remotely plausible.
I saw the flick in a packed 1st showing, and I was the only one who laffed out loud when Nimoy's character said "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." This tells me that (a) nobody else in the theater was over 35 and (b) efforts to insert even a little bit of ingenuity into the plot were wasted. OTOH, one of the comic-relief minibots elicited a hearty chuckle with the clipped-off expression "clusterf", which tells us once again how effectively the MPAA is protecting the tender sensibilities of the too-young-for-R kiddies.
There's no doubt that this movie will find its audience. I am not among them. I'd advise you not to be, either.