Why aren’t the Transformers useful? Three of my clickers haven’t worked in years; it takes a mild breeze to get my computer off-line; ask my toaster to morph into a slightly-more-aerodynamic toaster and it would have a heart attack (metaphorically speaking). Man has been making simple and not-so-simple machines for hundreds upon hundreds of years, which means that the phrase, “the ___________ is broken” has been around for generations. But you pump a series of 12-gauge shotgun blasts point blank into a transformer and it grows a tail and stabs you with it. I want that technology. Which brings up another point: how do transformers die? Or, more importantly, how do you know when one is dead?
Transformers: Dark of the Moon has the benefit of not being its predecessor Revenge of the Fallen, a monument to awful in any genre you care to place it. This franchise episode even had one clever idea – that a secret agenda for the original moon landing included exploring a technological anomaly on the surface when the cameras were turned off. This exploration in the first 20 minutes of screen time ends up freeing either good transformers or bad transformers (I forget wish and don’t really care). The key here is the painstaking recreation of the original moon landing. The effects are impressive; the 3D is impressive, too. To the uninitiated, Transformers: Dark of the Moon will constantly appear as if somebody vomited money on screen. In retrospect, I wish there was some sort of disclaimer after the moon recreation; something along the lines of, “whatever good we might have infused here will now promptly be undone by the rest of the film. Feel free not to pay attention. Thank you.”
As with any Transformer movie, there is no shortage in the amount of dialogue or number of characters you won’t care about. Unlike Revenge, however, I didn’t fall asleep this time. Yes, Shia LeBeouf is a leading actor the same way I am an adult walrus and Patrick Dempsey is a super villain the way rocks stick to things. And there were once again a plethora of “who cares?” robot battles … oh and bad humor because we gave some of the lesser robots annoying personalities … and, I’m sorry, where was I? This movie is better than the last one? Yeah, the same way getting punched in the gut beats getting a 2×4 to the skull.
The 3D effects were quite nice. Please don’t make another Transformers movie. Pretty please.
Rated PG-13, 157 Minutes
D: Michael Bay, bless you Michael Bay. Bless you, bless you.
W: Ehren Kruger
Genre: CGI idiocy
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Robots in disguise.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Anybody who has ever successfully used a dial-up telephone.
