Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

dir: Michael Bay

Michael Bay returns to fuck the proverbial metallic donkey again for fun and profit…

The last time I reviewed a Michael Bay – Transformers film, I made the point that Michael Bay is a donkeyfucker of long standing, who delivers exactly what he promises: 2 and a half hours of shiny, shiny donkeyfucking. As such, considering the vitriol his directorial abominations garner, I was simply stating the obvious that, whatever Bay’s actual intentions, pretentions and beliefs regarding the quality of the donkeyfucking he delivers on demand, he delivers exactly what he promises to the great unwashed texting, tweeting masses.

No-one expects either the Spanish Inquisition or decent acting performances from anyone in these flicks. No-one especially expects Shia La Fucking Beouf to act any better than he’s ever managed to in the past, because he’s always been terrible, and will always be terrible, unless they somehow mutate him in a lab or a meteorite crashes into his hideous head.

So what do people expect from a Transformers / Michael Bay donkeyfuckfest (I promise this will be the second-last time I use that phrase)? They expect a stupid plot that a child would feel insulted by, they expect an unnecessarily-elongated running time, and they expect big shiny robots transforming into other stuff, and then transforming back into robots in order to fuck shit up. And explosions, lots of explosions.

And he delivers exactly that level of prophesised crap. Nuns shouldn’t go to brothels in order to be shocked, SHOCKED at what happens there. You don’t voluntarily go to a sex show in Tijuana and turn around apoplectic with incredulity at the ripe piece of donkeyfucking you’ve just seen unfold before your disbelieving but slightly aroused eyes.

All you can do is complain about technique, style and duration, not about your abject surprise as to the content.

In this third unbelievable instalment in this mega-successful franchise that’s earned billions and billions of dollars, Michael Bay has his way with our precious human eyes and history the way the recent X-Men flick had its way with our 20th Century history. Instead of implying that the Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by and solved by good and evil mutants, this flick implies that the reason the moon landing even occurred was because of something that happened as part of the war on Cybertron, the planet where Giant Robots come from. So, sixty years ago or so, a robot spaceship crashed on the dark of the moon. Not the Dark Side of the Moon, but, as the title indicates, the Dark of the Moon.

Is that the only instance of profound leotardedness this movie is going to offer? Heavens to Betsy, No!

This kicks off the space race, as the Americans and the Russians desperately try to get to the moon first in order to find out what goodies were on the space craft.

American exceptionalism being what it is, of course the US gets there first, and conducts a top secret mission that only a handful of people know about, in between doing all the other Apollo 11 stuff for the cameras.

What’s this got to do with the ‘present’ day the flick is set in? Well, it appears that the Giant Death Robots that have unwillingly made the Earth their home and battlefield, are all still trying to do, um, something something. And in doing that thing, which takes lots of explosions and subterfuge, and driving really fast on the freeway, then the whole world, or at least the important bits of the world, being the American ones, could really be fucked up badly!

Bet you never saw that coming. The Autobots, apart from having a stupid name, are the good robots who work with the American government to take out terrorists and to do all sorts of other noble shit. The bad robots have the handy name of Decepticons, so named because they are Deceptive. But since they’re deceptive, as in they aim to deceive, it’s not really a good name for storytelling purposes.

As in, when someone sees a Decepticon, the dialogue doesn’t or can’t really go like this:

“Oh no, a Decepticon! We’re in unspeakable danger. Or, wait, maybe it’s just deceiving us, and is really good, in some way?”

It doesn’t really help their cause. The Autobots feel compelled to travel to the moon in order to investigate the wreck, seeing as there’s some guy called Sentinel Prime still up there who used to be really cool, back in the day.

But times change, man. Things change. You’ve changed, man. We used to party, but now you’re all about intergalactic evil and stuff.

Amidst all this stuff that’s going on, that really doesn’t feel like there’s that much at stake, is the touching story of Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) dealing with his impotence. He feels impotent because, even though he was instrumental in saving the world twice before, he can’t even get a job. His girlfriend, whose one distinguishing feature is the possession of the kind of collagen-inflated face/lips that are meant to make Angelina Jolie feel intimidated, makes more money than him. And her billionaire boss (Patrick Dempsey) is all successful and smarmy and attractive in a grown-up man-like way. Whereas Sam’s just got that nervy, meth addict kind of irritating thing going for him. To say that LaBeouf is the worst and most unnecessary thing, element, component of this film is perhaps hurtful, or unfair. But it’s not inaccurate. It’s pretty clear he’s the most inessential part of a super-sleek machine. He doesn’t know, or at least exhibit, any ability to act. At all. Not a fucking lick of interest in acting does he show.

On the other hand, overacting and hyperventilating he can do at the drop of a can of Lynx deodorant. None of it matters, because Michael Bay has never betrayed any interest or ability in coaxing decent performances from any actors he’s ever worked with. Occasionally, he still gets entertaining performances which are always a parody of acting, but that’s despite his direction, not because of it. Decent actors like Frances McDormand, John Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich and John Turturro here all act like they’ve been on a leash their whole lives, and they’re hungry for some scenery. Nothing they do matters, even less than the way that nothing the rest of us does matters in the grand scheme of things, in the face of Giant Robot Magic.

The last hour of the movie is a ceaseless orgy of violence, but it’s an entertaining orgy of violence: that is, if you like orgies and/or violence. It gets profoundly more lobotomised as it goes on, upping the visual wow factor but diminishing in the limited believability it could possibly manage to muster, but it is never less than visually explosive and, uh, colourful, with lots of movement and shininess.

Buildings falling in half for no earthly reason, taking fifteen minutes to do so, people basejumping just because Bay thinks it looks cool, space bridges, planets appearing without catastrophic gravitational forces being unleashed; all this nonsense doesn’t matter. It’s a film based on toys, whose purpose is to sell toys.

And, look! Giant robots blowing stuff up! Hooray!

Perhaps in an odd concession, there are elements of the film-making process (if you can stomach the concept that a) Michael Bay is a Bizarro-world filmmaker / auteur, and b) that he has a process beyond making shit blow up and filming women like they’re in the longest beer commercial in human history) that Bay tackles differently this time. The flick is nowhere near as visually spastic as his other Transformer flicks, or his other flicks in general. The editing has been handled far more sedately, and he uses a stack of slow-motion sequences to allow the audience to at least have a cursory understanding of what’s happening in a scene, even if what’s happening is profoundly stupid. Being able to differentiate between where Optimus Prime begins and Megatron ends might seem pointless and unnecessary to you, but then again, you have a fuller, richer life than that of the hapless amateur movie reviewer who writes for your amusement.

Of course, this ‘new’ approach to visual coherence doesn’t at all extend to plot, story or human characters. People appear and disappear at times, characters appearing and disappearing, moving from scene to scene with little by way of connective tissue to explain how or why anything is done or happening. If you’re (occasionally) like me, that relevant part of the brain gets slightly anaesthetised after a while, so though I should have cared more, I just couldn’t muster the energy.

I’m not ashamed (though I should be) to say that I derived a certain amount of enjoyment out of watching this flick. Its politics, both (gay panic) sexual and across the conservative/liberal divide, are utterly absurd, reactionary and ignorant, but then that can’t detract from the awesome actions of giant robots tearing the place up. Despite the fact that the robots do all the important stuff, the flick spends an inordinate amount of time pointlessly giving the longest, most inept and least satisfying blowjob to the US military that you can possibly imagine, or can compare to having given or received whilst on a painful amount of drugs or booze. Michael Bay likes to think he’s honouring the grunts on the ground, or the people operating the drones, I guess, but mostly it makes them look like flustered and fuming ants at the feet of titanium giants.

I like Bumblebee, and I like Optimus Prime. I should be ashamed of myself for liking them, but there it is. I derive pleasure from watching them do their thing, and their constant attempts to protect humanity from other evil robots and, occasionally, themselves, warms some part of my metallic heart.

Should this be happening? Probably not, but it’s not like I’m telling you to rush out and watch it. If you’ve endured any of Bay’s other flicks, you already know full well whether you have any stomach for this bullshit, or any appetite for it.

Enjoyable robots. Terrible humans. There’s not much you can do against such an awesome combination.

6 times I can’t be alone in wishing Shia got his head ripped off by a metallic hand out of 10

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“What you don't realize, my Autobot brothers, is in order to win the war, a deal had to be made with Megatron.” – Shakespeare couldn’t have said it better himself – Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon