Transformers: Dark of the Moon Review

I loved the first Transformers. We’re talking about an intensely hormonal, all-consuming, unwholesome kind of love here; if I could I would do unchristian things with that movie.

The sequel on the other hand, well that’s when things took a bad turn. With its insubstantial plot, endless cavalcade of cheap comic-relief “characters” and cutaways of dogs humping each other on lawn furniture, I walked out of that one feeling very dirty. So when the next sequel was announced, I was wary; I wasn’t sure I could trust again, not after the horrors the series inflicted on me the last time around. But remembering all the good days this franchise and I used to have before the sequel, I cautiously approached this next attempt to reconcile.

Okay, so Revenge of the Fallen was released during the Writer’s Strike, that would make anyone a little upset. I get that. And everybody makes mistakes sometimes. So I just knew that the latest Transformers would shape up, that we could finally get things back to the way they used to be.

I’ve got to stop getting myself into these abusive relationships.

People seem to have this predisposition against special effects driven movies. The term “Special Effects” has become like “Special Education,” more reflective of a lack, a debility, than an alternative set of circumstances that should invite a different form of consideration (maybe we’ll start calling them SPEF movies). It’s gotten to a point where in film criticism, the phrases “It has great visual effects” and “The film was a two hour lobotomy performed on fully conscious minds, whose bodies sat helpless amidst the horror” have become synonymous.

And frankly that’s crazy because movies are by nature a form of visual art. And special effects – whether they be stop-motion, prosthetics, CSO or CGI – offer a means of crafting reality on film, a means of shaping the world into something it has never been before. And, yes, there does still need to be some narrative framework strong enough to support it and, yes, half the movies made to rely on their special effects don’t have the technology or the imagination to back it up. But every once in a while, you get that one movie, that one glorious little title that constructs a universe for you in two hours, that creates images no one else had ever before realized, that paints a picture for your mind’s eye as much as your real ones.

Take the obvious example: Star Wars. The original movie wasn’t much in the way of plot; basically, George Lucas just read Joseph Conrad’s take on The Hero’s Journey – which is to say the underlying bedrock of all western storytelling laid out as a basic narrative outline – and adapted it to a space age setting. So, really, it’s quintessential boilerplate writing, following the most basic, most universal, plot formula ever conceived. But what made Star Wars work, what solidified its position in film history and enabled it to restructure Hollywood’s entire business model, was the quality and originality of the special effects driven universe it fabricated.

And I don’t mean that the explosions were bigger or the models seemingly more authentic. What I mean is the thought, the design, the visual craftsmanship that went into every part of the galaxy. Star Wars was an amalgam of images, borrowing ideas from German silent film (Metropolis), the Western genre and Eastern cultures (Darth Vader as evil space samurai); it mixed gun fights with nautical/aerial battles, sword fights and grand scale chases. The Jedi were at any one moment priests, wizards, heretics and classic swordsmen. The Star Wars universe was a blending of familiar things that had never been put together before: the peanut butter/banana/potato chip sandwich of cinematography (seriously, try it).

It also did some blending of unfamiliar things. Tatooine alone consisted of dozens of intricately designed alien races, nearly any one of which could have been the sole focus of a lesser movie, but existed here simply to create atmosphere, giving the universe a scale that not even its successors could match. You compare any random planet in any Star Wars movie (even the new trilogy) to, say, the bland, lifeless, illogical and macho-mad world of Predators and it should be obvious how Lucas puts his genre to shame.

Michael Bay really did accomplish something similar in Transformers. After all, how many movies are there where you can see everyday vehicles change into crazy big robots with swords and machine guns? How many iterations of this franchise have put this much detail into the design of its characters? Science-fiction is often at its best when it infuses the paranormal into the normal, when it subverts the mundane and morphs it into the extraordinary. And rarely is that ideal realized as thoroughly as it is in Transformers.

Even narratively that’s the case. Transformers opted away from the monomyth approach adopted by both Star Wars and Avatar and instead acted as something of a smorgasbord of genres. In Sam, we had a pretty standard get-the-car-to-get-the-girl, teenaged angst rom-com. In the military guys, we had a war movie complete with the exact same kinds of characterization. In the Secretary of Defense and the NSA, we had a political conspiracy theory. And, god, we even had a Cops parody.

This is all stuff we’ve seen before, but – much like Star Wars – never blended so seamlessly together. And that blending occurred through the sci-fi robots and special effects. The teenager’s car becomes an Autobot. The military are attacked by their own war machines. The NSA is thrown into upheaval, nearly leading to global war, by something so dinky it can turn into a cell phone. And that is magnificent. There is a very well-crafted and fluid complexity in this disguised under humor and a sort of narrative playfulness that avoids the triteness of most summer blockbusters.

Special effects movies like these aren’t as stupid as people assume, they’re not even as shallow. They just don’t rely on the narrative aspects of cinema to express themselves, in the same way a painting doesn’t require an accompanying novel to explain it. They can relate meaning beneath the simplistic framework of their stories through imagery and symbolism, through themes that can be dissected and assessed. And so – much in the way Star Wars isn’t a movie about World War II or burgeoning seventies anti-authoritarianism or religion or spirituality but has been seen in later years to reflect these things – Transformers will, I think, be seen as a movie about technologization, about the merger of humanity and the machines it creates and about militarism and consumerism. Christ, if Donna Haraway ever saw that movie, her head would explode; and then she’d build a new head out of bits and bobs and run around the streets declaring to all who will listen how she saw this coming.

And I bring up this incredibly lengthy dalliance because… well, first of all, because it needed to be said… and also because it needs to be recognized that the sequels to Transformers don’t share in its intelligence or value. And so Dark of the Moon – like Revenge of the Fallen before it – is a prototypical SPEF movie, noise for the sake of noise, and basically everything we dreaded a Michael Bay Transformers movie would be before he went and surprised us. There’s no progression, no advancement on what was done before, nothing to elevate this movie. It just rests on the same special effects (which aren’t as impressive anymore because they’re not as novel) without the narrative dynamism and variety of its predecessor.

Actually, really, all three movies have the exact same plot: a random, all-powerful Mechguffin (AllSpark/Matrix/The Ark) has made its way from Cybertron to Earth (because there are apparently no gravitational bodies in between), played a secret role in human history (and, boy, did they overdo that this time) and now is hotly contested by Optimus Prime and his heroic Autobots and the nefarious Decepticons led each time by a new and devious commander (Megatron/The Fallen/Revealing his name would be a spoiler, so let’s call him Mike). Honestly, I’ve seen police procedurals less formulaic.

The human element here is grating as well. In the first movie, they were necessary; they provided a means of introducing us to the absurd, of establishing the normal which can then be subverted. But by now, the Autobots are an established presence; they’re not exactly robots in disguise anymore, so even the transforming gimmick is itself pointless (save one instance with Soundwave). And the humans aren’t needed to introduce us to them, we already know them.

Well…kinda…

The Transformers in these movies have never been the most fleshed-out characters. In the first film, this wasn’t such a big deal because it was the introduction to the mythos. It still did better than its sequels though; it took time to stop, introduce us to each robot, give us their names, an idea of their personality and their alternate form. And while it never dug too deeply into their motivations, it did have that one nice scene where Ironhide questioned why they had to worry about the humans in this conflict; it was a reasonable concern, a believable one given recent events and it added a layer of emotional plausibility to his character.

But Revenge of the Fallen never followed through on that. In point of fact, rather than develop its existing manageable cast, it just cluttered more faces on top of them. You couldn’t even call the Transformers of the second movie supporting characters, more like really expensive extras.

The third movie at least seems to keep its focus (though I think it expects us to remember the Autobots from Revenge that that movie never bothered to introduce), but the Autobots themselves are no more developed than they were in the first movie. The Decepticons are now mostly cannon fodder (again, even they at least had names in the first movie) and a new (and potentially interesting) dynamic between Optimus and Mike never goes anywhere. And ultimately, it’s hard to care when the familiar faces on either side start dying off.

But then that’s what people think the humans are for: they’re our emotional outlets. This is patently ridiculous though. Sci-fi franchises have proven time and again that it’s very possible to make audiences care about absurd creations. This exact franchise has proven this when the eighties movie came along and essentially killed off the entire line and traumatized a generation or in Beast Wars (which didn’t even have human characters) or in the first Michael Bay movie when both Sam and Bumblebee were captured by Sector 7. Watch that scene again and tell me whom you care about more. I’m betting it ain’t Sam.

And that’s not a jab at Sam or Shia Labeouf, but rather a tip of my hat to Bay. Because that scene – that scene where he makes us care more about the fate of a construct that isn’t even real over that of the actual physical person – that’s visual craftsmanship right there, the sort of thing seriously lacking in Dark of the Moon. While it’s true that Bumblebee does again get a big emotive moment, it’s an empty shadow of his first movie scene and since his fate is a foregone conclusion, an infinitely less affecting one.

The prelude to that scene might have worked better if the Autobots involved were better established, but the movie clearly doesn’t care about them. After all, it’s so distracted by the humans in the final battle it never even shows their capture. And whenever it does focus on an actual robot, it’s always friggin’ Optimus Prime (the only Autobot who can get things done, it seems). So if the movie itself doesn’t care, why should I?

And the idea of human characters as emotional outlets is further invalidated by the fact that none of the extensive cast is better developed than their cybernetic costars; they’re just on screen a lot more. Their purpose in the narrative is by now obsolete and nothing is contrived to replace it, so they just sort of linger in a limbo devoid of narrative momentum. Sam is the only one to get a subplot of his very own, but it’s a subplot about how obsolete he is, and all the whiny self-important petulance that brings out in him.

I used to like Sam. His constant panic-mode was always a lot of fun. And I remember in the first movie, it was he more than anyone that expressed that great sci-fi adventurer’s spirit that much of the genre has lost. After first meeting Bumblebee, Mikaela was frightened and wanted to run away, but Sam calmed her and said simply: “Forty years from now when you’re looking back on your life, don’t you want to say you got in the car?” That’s a great line, a great moment, a great attitude, a great embrace of the weird for its own sake. Now we get a Sam who wants in on the Autobot action not because he’s intellectually curious, not because he cares about the cause, but because he wants to feel like a big man again. The weird becomes something to be exploited for personal aggrandizement, not explored for the simple sake of exploring. How far these characters have fallen.

Still, Dark of the Moon does modulate its sense of humor far, far, far, far better than Revenge of the Fallen, which took some of my favorite funny folks from the first film (like Simmons and Sam’s parents) and ruined them. Dark of the Moon manages to take those same characters I was now dreading to see again and make them enjoyable once more. Even the new faces fare well.

There is also a potentially interesting development in the introduction of humans allied with Decepticons, which the Michael Bay of the first movie would have taken somewhere crazy, fun and interesting, but here just sort of sits. Neither bad nor good, neither purposeful nor completely squandered, it’s just sort of there. One could at least have hoped that by having a human antagonist, Sam could still play hero in the final battle without… oh… I don’t know… single-handedly killing Starscream!

That’s probably a spoiler, but screw it, because come on, with all of these giants and mechanized gods, how the hell does someone that important get so pathetic a sendoff?

And that’s the crazy thing, Bay is often chastised for his reliance on special effects, but in Dark of the Moon he seems almost timid (by his standards) in their use. I mean there are some good things (Shockwave adds an even greater sense of scale to the proceedings, even if his complicated transformations could do with some more explaining), but he definitely seems to be bored playing with big robots and so focuses on more traditional, gun-based and car chase action scenes.

Hold on, I have to yawn here.

And so you see the problem with overemphasizing the human cast isn’t just a favoring of gunplay or CG violence – because all the humans do anyway is shout and shoot things – it’s that character development is across the board absent and at least the robotic characters would have been more fun to watch. The humans have their moments (trying to stay in a building as Shockwave in serpent form burrows through it is a particularly impressive part of the final battle), but they do nothing and detract from the core of the experience.

And good god that final battle goes on forever and nothing in the movie justifies its length, like the monumental final battle of the third Pirates of the Caribbean was justified. I know that movie had its own problems, but at least its grand climax felt like it had been building for some time (at least over two movies) and involved heroes and villains we had come to know and understand, motivations and rules that kind of made sense and big character development scenes – like the marriage, Bootstrap’s betrayal and Jack’s change of heart – that came at the end of individually developed arcs.

But Dark of the Moon hardly feels like a conclusion. If it weren’t for all the big-name deaths, I’d never have suspected it was meant to be. Because again there’s no progression. With its recycled plot and nonexistent subplots, it doesn’t feel at all like things have built to this moment. Maybe if, for example, Sam’s heroic infiltration of Decepticon-occupied Chicago was done to save The Girlfriend, instead of a girlfriend, it would have resonated more. And, yes, I know neither girlfriend was particularly meaningful and I know that Megan Fox wasn’t dropped for artistic reasons, but retaining her character would have at least given that bit a connection to the series as a whole.

Similarly, the new main villain also detracts from the significance of Optimus’ final encounter, which we can all likely agree should have been against Megatron. I mean, Megatron’s in the movie, but really only because he’s Megatron and thus has to be. He actually seems to sit out most of the final battle and spends a good chunk of the movie taking a backseat to Mike (as he spent the last movie kissing up to The Fallen) so that Mike could not establish himself as an interesting villain.

And sadly, Megatron really is still this series’ most successful antagonist. The first movie managed to take one of the geek world’s most useless bad guys (Really, G1 Megatron rarely came up with a plan more elaborate than yelling “I am Megatron!” and wondering why he wasn’t ruling the universe yet) and while not making him more intelligent, gave him a sort of heft, power and gleeful sadism that made him a lot of fun. In ten minutes of screen time, Megatron outclassed nearly every other Transformer in terms of great moments. He tore Autobots in half, flicked terrified humans away like wayward crumbs, offered to make Sam his pet and most importantly, smacked Optimus Prime around like a little girl.

Optimus had already been established at that point as pretty much untouchable (see his fight with Bonecrusher) and so it only made Megatron look more impressive that he could so easily best him. And then it was Megatron who killed Prime in the second movie. So, yeah, having Optimus Prime return in this last conflict and finally rise up to defeat the enemy that twice vanquished him would have been epic beyond epic. And while you might say that kind of happens, it’s so clearly an afterthought that it loses all impact.

And this really is disappointing because I really, really wanted to like this movie (as my love letter to the first one should attest). And in terms of the quality of its special effects, Transformers: Dark of the Moon completely crushes its summertime kin. Thor was a movie that painted the realm of the gods as a glitzy outer space disco. X-Men: First Class was perhaps too minimalist, giving us numerous action scenes with Xavier and Magneto making awkward sex faces while stuff may or may not have happened around them. Green Lantern did pretty well, but it looks like it was drawn in crayon compared to Dark of the Moon.

But nothing is done with all these great effects. The movie lacks the wit, the purpose, the drive, vision, playfulness and adventurousness of the original. It reeks of creative exhaustion, of pumping out one more movie to wrap this up so everyone involved can move onto to other things. And the result is too disconnected to work as a conclusion, too normal to be a memorable fantasy epic, too goofy to be drama, not goofy enough to be camp, too dull to hold interest and too loud to sleep through.

And the truly most frustrating thing is the ending: where the Decepticons are all dead, the Autobots look forward to their new union with humanity, where Sam gets the girl and celebrates with Bumblebee, where essentially Dark of the Moon asserts its complete irrelevance by reminding us that after two sequels (totaling around five hours) we ended up exactly where we were at the end of the first movie, the good movie, the movie that showed Transformers can be fun and intelligent and that special effects movies don’t all have to be so retarded.

Movie Reviews, Videogame REviews, Short Stories and Essays at The Fragmented Paradigm

www.fparadigm.com

Stevennix2001's Review:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Transformers-Dark-of-the-Moon-2011