When the second installment of this trilogy movie has manifest the brilliance of the whole package, then the third one is far beyond what we expect. The former involves a giant humanoid robot effectively anally raping a cement mixer in front of the pyramids, the only way from there is this.
And yeah, so it is that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is miles better thanTransformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, but still falls miles short of the daft charm that made Transformers such fun and awesome.
And yeah, so it is that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is miles better thanTransformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, but still falls miles short of the daft charm that made Transformers such fun and awesome.
In fact, fun doesn't feature much at all in Dark Of The Moon: Bay had promised that the second sequel would be "darker ... more emotional", and for the most part he's succeeded. If, that is, you are prepared to believe - as I do - that giant robots can inspire an emotional response, because the humans give you jack shit. A few months clear of college, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) has a hot new girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), and a lot of time on his hands: he can't get a job to save himself, no matter how many times he mentions that "PUSA" gave him a medal.
We learn this after a handy prologue that explains how Earth ended up in the pickle that won Witwicky his medals. To wit, how the Autobots and Decepticons' war came to Earth via... the Moon! Yes, it turns out an Autobot spacecraft crashed into the dark side of the Moon back in 1961, and the ensuing space race between the USA and USSR was not so much to make giant leaps for mankind, but to recon alien technology.
Since then - and since we last left Optimus Prime and his friends - the Autobots have been working with the US military, popping off around the world to dish out justice to an assortment of central casting villains of nondescript non-Caucasian appearance.
It's on one of these trips - to Chernobyl, which with its abandoned classic cars and, er, merry-go-round, looks an awful lot like a Dwight Yoakam video clip from 1997 - that Lt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his crew are ambushed by a Decepticon driving an enormous mechanical hydra (Shockwave and his Driller).
Meanwhile, people with intel about NASA's Space Race-era involvement with the Autobots are being picked off one-by-one by a Decepticon assassin (Laserbeak).
The extended US military/Autobot crew puts two and two together to make five, and a sulking Optimus throws a bitch fit back at the base to convince the Secretary of Defense (Frances McDormand) to allow them to retrieve the crashed spaceship's pilot - Sentinel Prime - from the Moon to avoid certain Decepticon victory.
Megatron, exiled in generic Africa, gets wind of all this and springs into action, too. All of this and the film is not even a third of the way through (it's overstuffed at 154-minutes). Suffice to say there is later a plan afoot to reboot Cybertron and downtown Chicago isn't going to like it.
Revenge screenwriter Ehren Kruger has again drawn on Transformers lore for this iteration, at Bay's command, though there's so much mangling and editing of said lore - Laserbeak is now a computer, Soundwave returns from Revenge and still shows no sign of turning into a cassette deck; once again Starscream, one of pop culture's best villains, is relegated to the background - you wonder why he bothered.
(Comic relief this time comes from Brains and Wheelie, two small and non-descript Autobots - one looks like Johnny-5, the other like a pile of Meccano with a sea anemone on top - who live on Witwicky's balcony. Mercifully, unlike Revenge's Skids and Mudflap, they are occasionally actually funny.)
Dark Of The Moon's politics are, for a "USA! USA!" stylist such as Bay, rather perplexing: it's pro-troops, yet curiously anti-Army/government. Considering the immense marketing juggernaut the franchise has become, the film's distrust of corporate America is odd, too. It's almost - almost - refreshing.
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