Transformers: Dark of the Moon Does So Little With So Much

Transformers: Dark of the Moon wants to be seen as an evolution of its franchise, but for all of its attempts at surface-level aesthetic changes, it still wants to blow up the same boring buildings, smash together the same action-figure-like robots, and ogle the same beautiful women. It’s another loud, pointless Michael Bay sequel that doesn’t bother to look for a human touch amidst the carnage. It plays with the history of the moon landings in the same way that Revenge of the Fallen played with Egyptian mythology, to marginally better effect, though that improvement is overwhelmed by how unremittingly loud it really is. While nothing here is quite as aggressively distasteful as the small, leg-humping robots of before, it’s still quite bad, an impersonal collection of loud, action-packed setpieces like Autobots chasing panther-like Decepticons on a crowded interstate, which sounds cooler than it really is. Bay’s philosophy here is one of the bigger, the better, and go bigger he does, hammering Chicago with a massive Decepticon invasion that ends up looking lighter than the light coming from the screen; the anti-CGI movement is misguided, but it didn’t come from nowhere. Rarely has nothing felt so overwhelming.

It’s been three years since everything and nothing went down on the Egyptian pyramids, and America has begun to recruit the help of the Autobots in its own petty conflicts, because of course we have. Within the movie’s mythology, the Apollo missions to the moon in 1969 were an elaborate cover-up for our government’s investigation of a Cybertronian crash landing, and I have to give Bay props for trying to ground his story’s version of Earth in some semblance of context. However, as you probably guessed, Dark of the Moon doesn’t do anything meaningful with these changes, as the story of this movie, if you can even call it that, is secondary to its impersonal, metallic spectacle. Bay wants to make some changes, but he’s ironically too attached to the way he does things for these changes to really matter. That one can only see massive robots hammering each other so many times before it gets boring is a hard pill for him to swallow.

Speaking of changes, Megan Fox compared Bay to Hitler during an interview with Wonderland Magazine in the wake of Revenge of the Fallen, and so, being the reputably thick-skinned director he was, he fired her and replaced her with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely, even getting two little robots to bad-mouth Fox’s Mikaela in his screenplay. No matter, because the two women are practically interchangeable, equally lacking in personality. We are quite literally introduced to Huntington-Whitely’s Carly with a close-up of her panties-clad butt. Sex sells, and Bay seems too concerned about watering his lust down enough to get that PG-13 rating.

Once again, Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky is the lone bright spot of a boring human cast that has been assembled for either their looks or their jokes, but one element that actually works in Dark of the Moon for a change is the relationship between Optimus Prime and his complicated brother, Sentinel. Though you shouldn’t expect this movie to possess the same depth as other dramas, this particular element is more personal and intriguing than other elements in the movie, and that’s because it feels as though you’re getting to discover both machines on some level. Most of this movie is no more than what meets the eye. Optimus and Sentinel’s relationship may be the one element that isn’t.

There are alliances and betrayals in this movie, but because Michael Bay has always treated the Autobots and Decepticons as mere paragons of spectacle – maybe with the exception of Bumblebee, and now Optimus and Sentinel – it’s hard for anything that happens here to really feel like it matters, even if I can give it points for sometimes trying to. Why are these bots fighting and betraying each other in the first place? To be ruthlessly honest, it’s really because they’ll make Bay and Paramount Pictures a billion dollars at the box office. People don’t come to watch a Transformers movie to gauge whether it’ll get nominated for an Oscar, or because the characters in them really matter. They come to them because they’ll get to see hot women and big explosions.

Aliens have been targeting Chicago and Washington D.C. ever since Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956, and Bay just doesn’t do anything that we haven’t seen in other stories. He does the same thing, and not as well. Transformers: Dark of the Moon asks for your wallet instead of asking you to care, and after three times around this strange, shallow merry-go-round, the novelty continues to wear off. Where are the people with real personalities, the skyscrapers that actually feel like there’s people inside when they crumble? Bay doesn’t know, and he doesn’t bother to look for them, either.  

Transformers: Dark of the Moon – 3/10

2 Corinthians 3:4-6