Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Rosie Huntington-Whitely, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and John Turturro
Directed By: Michael Bay
Screenplay By: Ehren Kruger
Produced By: Don Murphy, Ton Desanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 157 minutes
Website: transformersmovie.com
Budget: $195 million
Genre: Action
Release Date: June 29, 2011
Reviewers use the term “critic proof” to describe something that will succeed whether or not it has the support of a critical consensus. It’s a largely dismissive term for something – a song, a game, a book, a movie – that will hit with audiences regardless of its ability to stand up to scrutiny.
Director Michael Bay has been the very definition of “critic proof” for pretty much the entirety of his career. Regardless of the movie, from Bad Boys to Armageddon to Pearl Harbor, Bay has applied his own brand of “explode first, ask questions later” filmmaking to a string of loud, bright, frenetic, and dumb action movies with superlative financial results. No overblown spectacle, no excessive display of sex, violence, and general gratuity has ever been safe from Michael Bay, and audiences have rewarded him time and again with butts in seats and money in the bank.
What to say about Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in Bay’s series of toy-based blockbusters? Somehow, it’s the most coherent yet of a franchise about two factions of alien robots hiding on Earth in the shape of common motor vehicles. Dark of the Moon posits that the 1969 lunar landings were a cover-up for an expedition to investigate the crash site of an alien craft, a claim given credence in the film by the presence of the real Buzz Aldrin and a series of awkwardly assembled sound bites and digital renditions of various presidents. The craft houses the inert body of a long-thought-dead Autobot (good guys) leader, Sentinel Prime (voiced by Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy). Sentinel had with him technologies crucial to the war with the Decepticons (bad guys), and the rediscovery of his craft decades after the lunar landings brings hope to Optimus Prime (excellent voice actor Peter Cullen) and the stranded Autobots under his command.
But humanity has its own problems. Series protagonist Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) finds himself out of college and still unemployed three whole months later (cry me a river, kid). He’s living in DC with his museum curator girlfriend, Carly (underwear model Rosie Huntington-Whitely), after being dumped off-screen by previous love interest, Michaela (Megan Fox, not present). Sam’s feeling a bit pathetic despite living in a cavernous apartment with his pin-up girlfriend. He yearns for the days when he was saving the Earth at the side of the Autobots, a player rather than a bystander. Events conspire to give Sam his wish: it turns out that Megatron (voiced by The Matrix’s Hugo Weaving) and his Decepticons have a vested interest in Sentinel Prime and his technology, and only Sam has the key information that could, of course, save the planet.
The rest is all slapstick and explosions as Sam, the Autobots, and their human allies in the covert government agency “Sector 7” race to outsmart and overcome the Decepticons. Casualties are many, many more things explode, and robots punch and shoot each other with the regularity you’d expect from Transformers. The film is a full, exhausting two-and-a-half hours, climaxing with the destruction of a major American city. On a local note, the Milwaukee Art Museum appears prominently in several scenes, where it plays a car museum owned by Carly’s smarmy, lecherous boss (Patrick Dempsey of “Grey’s Anatomy”). Respectable actor-types John Malkovich and Frances McDormand have fun cashing their paychecks as zany government agents in the thick of the Transformers’ war zone, while a steady stream of zany minor characters from the previous two movies provide exposition, comic relief, and possible victims of Decepticon violence.
All of the Michael Bay hallmarks are present, up to and including jingoism, sexism, objectification, a dash of homophobia, and a wanton disregard for human life. In a Bay production, though, that’s all par for the course. No one hires Bay for his subtle character studies, or his subtle ANYTHING for that matter, and it’s that trait that makes him almost ideal for prototypical mindless summer fare like Dark of the Moon. Working off a screenplay by series newcomer Ehren Kruger, Bay applies his usual level of full-throttle to a story less unwieldy than the previous installment, Revenge of the Fallen. Kruger’s script does a fine job with the “secret history” aspect of Sentinel Prime’s arrival and affords Sam his most sympathetic paper-thin character arc of the series.
The movie’s last hour degenerates into identical-looking robots smashing buildings and each other, but that’s all part of the formula. Bay will never be mistaken for Woody Allen, and that’s apparently just how audiences like it: caffeinated, unrelenting, and never letting coherence or empathy get in the way of sensory overload. Bay is “critic proof” in that he knows what the kind of audience who goes to see a Michael Bay film wants to see, and in that sense he delivers. If you were already inclined to see Dark of the Moon or liked the earlier Transformers movies, you will like this capstone installment. If you hated the earlier movies or are justly suspect of Bay’s faster-and-louder style, you will certainly not like it. Dark of the Moon is the best of the three Transformers movies, but there’s another phrase, not exclusive to critics, that applies: damning with faint praise.
2 Stars
