Film Review: Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

It's hard being a Transformers fan since Michael Bay made the first film in 2007. The film was good, a entertaining starting block, and more importantly we finally saw Optimus Prime et al on the big screen. Things were promising for the sequel now the scene had been set.

We all know what a train wreck Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen was. Just check out Mark Kermode's now infamous review of it (I actually am saving watching his review of this second sequel till I finish writing this), things were bad.

But for Dark Of The Moon we were promised the comedy would be dialed back, and it would be very dark. At one point a comparison to Black Hawk Down was made (which, in hindsight, is hilarious), but still I wasn't exactly filled with hope but wanted to see it regardless. How could it be any worse than Revenge Of The Fallen?

The answer to that? Easily. The film is so bad that about ten more minutes of it's overblown running time and I would have not been a fan of Transformers anymore, and that says a lot coming from me.

To get the plot out of the way - the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was a front for a secret mission to recover a craft that landed on the Moon, sent from the soon to be devastated Cybertron by the Autobots. This leads Decepticon leader Megatron to find out that the human race now owns one of the parts which can assist in bringing former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime back to life (in one of the few good moments,  Sentinel is voiced by Leonard Nimoy as he did in the 1984 animated movie.)

Sadly the hyper annoying human characters remain. Sam Witwicky (the increasingly awful Shia Labeouf) has a new girlfriend in Carly (British model Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely, who is fucking diabolical. In a movie full of bad acting, she takes things to a new depth) and he's looking for a job and he gets one working for Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich) and then Ken Jeong from The Hangover turns up, playing the same role seemingly and...I'm sorry I'm out. The human element is dreadful, dreadful shit and ruins the entire film.

Let's start with Ken Jeong as he was the thing I mentioned last. It's like Michael Bay just watched The Hangover the night before and decided to shoehorn him in. In fact the entire situation with Sam looking for a job doesn't even need to be in the film. If they insist on having a pointless storyline like this at least make it have some kind of payoff at some point. Malkovich is last seen (and I'm not making this up) being TICKLED by Bumblebee. Meanwhile Carly's boss (Patrick Dempsey) is the (rather obvious) human bad guy (and Sam could have got a job with him), and it takes forever for the film to get there.

Sams parents are back too. For no reason whatsoever. And John Tuturro's Agent Simmons returns, also for no reason other than to chat up Frances McDormand's Mearing. And her character serves no purpose other than to appear a bit bitchy for a few minutes, then instantly soften, then vanish for ages.

The makers of this must have driven up the houses of Frances McDormand, John Turturro and John Malkovich with so much money to do this. It's probably the lowest point on all their CVs combined.

Near the start, though I was quite interested in the Moon stuff, although why they kept needing to have presidential impersonators on screen I don't know, and pretty much everything with the Autobots and Decepticons kept me watching. Except the little comedy pair of Autobots, who are essentially replacing the annoying pair from the last film!

Ah yes, the comedy. Let me just go off on a tangent here. It isn't dialed back, and it isn't funny unless you have suffered some serious blow to the head. It just all misses the mark by a long, long shot.

"But it's a kids film!" I hear you cry. You could have fooled me! Opening with a gratuitous arse shot of Carly, repeated strong language and several instances of people being literally blown apart, a lot of this is not suitable for kids. And to be fair, Bay is probably not the best choice for someone to direct a kids film.

But anyway, I tried to keep interested in the parts of the film that actually contained Transformers, but it was a losing battle, every time something interesting happened, we went back to check on Sam, or some other annoying/superfluous character. The absolute nadir of this came when a climatic fight started between Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime, and we had an instant cut away to Sam. I don't want to see what Shia LaBeouf is up to, it's probably just stepping out of a car with that weird constipated looking on his face! Nor do I want to see his balloon lipped girlfriend stand there pouting in slow motion FOR NO REASON. I want to see robots kick the ever loving shit out of each other!

By this point I didn't care about any of it, I really didn't. I'm pretty sick of the franchise and if we get another one there needs to be some serious changes. The first few are covered, Michael Bay and Shia LaBeouf are not returning, this is good. But we really don't need humans with love interests and sub plots, we just need the robots (who can talk, by the way, so they can explain the story without the need for actors to do it again, but I guess the only people who will get any enjoyment out of this were dropped on their heads at birth) and the army guys (rumour has it Jason Statham may end up in the 4th movie, he would be perfect as an army guy) but we will see.

As it stands now, the whole franchise can just go away and never return. It says a lot that after 3 attempts, the cheesy as hell animated movie is still the strongest in the series. Go check that out.

*
One star is being generous to this absolute turd. Every time it starts to get vaguely interesting, pointless, annoying characters are shoehorned in to keep the idiot public happy. Fucking terrible, but the 3D was good. The one star can be for that.