Features > Movie Reviews > Transformers: Dark Of…

This would be Michael Bay’s third attempt at making a convincing CGI action blockbuster from a line of pre-teen toys. And the good news is: it’s less bad than the first two.

Now, I will be the first to say that I hated Transformers 1 and 2. Of course I wasn’t the only one. Transfomers; Revenge of the Fallen scored a miserable 20% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and even Bay now admits it wasn’t any good – not that it was anything less than a massive box office hit.

Dark of the Moon has several things going for it. First up, it’s a more ambitious and engaging story. Audaciously drafting in a supporting cast that includes John F Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (in person), screenwriter Ehren Kruger reimagines the Space Race as a covert response to Autobots on the moon, and concocts a reasonably clever Decepticon conspiracy that puts the world in peril yet again.

Not one to do things by halves, Bay maximizes the scale of these events, bringing in not just two but three worlds for extra oomph, taking a potshot at a third President (Obama) and decapitating a fourth (the Lincoln Memorial). He also lays waste to the city of Chicago in the movie’s relentless hour-long climax. I couldn’t help comparing this non-stop barrage of explosions, toppling buildings and fighting with Takashi Miike’s recent 13 Assassins – a significantly more controlled and choreographed slugfest, and one that mostly avoids the bombastic repetition Bay falls into here. But at least the comparison did make me appreciate for the first time the debt the Transformers owe to the samurai tradition, with its sense of honour, obligation and chivalry.

The climax may be all over the place, but again, the scale is impressive: Bay has put his gargantuan budget on screen in scenes of rampant destruction. I liked the sky-diving antics and there is much more transformer-on-transformer action this time – the CGI has reached a point where Bay doesn’t have to disguise its limitation in his trademark blurry cutting style. That’s also probably a response to working in 3D – a visual texture that actually enhances this movie.

Still, let’s not go overboard. The screenplay is still pants. Kruger seems incapable of writing a well balanced scene, and when actors as capable as Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and John Turturro are left looking foolish, well, there’s not much hope for poor Rosie Huntington-Whitely, the English model who has been brought in to fill Megan Fox’s skimpy dresses and tight jeans. The stabs at humour (surprisingly frequent) are just pathetic, and there’s still a real problem with the disembodied voices of the Autobots, which inexplicably tend towards regional accents – presumably a way to substitute for actual character.

While we’re at it, my fundamental beef with the Transformers series remains intact: I don’t know a five or six year old boy who isn’t crazy about the toys. But the movies’ intense focus on action (which is, let’s face it, just a polite word for violence) is clearly aimed at kids two or three times older. The film is rated 12A in Britain. Even if we accept that this franchise “belongs” to teenagers, I’m not comfortable with Bay’s crude militarism, his sexism, or his homophobic “jokes”. Enjoy!

Read our reviews of Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.