Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon continues the story of Sam Witwicky and his Autobot friends. While Sam struggles to gain a purpose in life outside of Decepticon attacks, the Autobots are off helping the government on secret missions. Then everything is torn apart by the discovery of the original Autobot escape ship, known as The Ark, and the captain of that ship, Sentinel Prime. He alone holds the key to technology that could either help reshape the Transformers home world or completely destroy ours. The Decepticons, completely aware of this discovery, make an immediate power play and the war is back, bigger than ever.

Kids buying the Transformer toys today only want one thing, huge robots in spectacular 3D slow motion destroying each other and every building in sight. From this narrow viewpoint, Bay delivers in bulk. The highway fight sequence brought back memories of other high-speed terror scenes like in Matrix Reloaded and The Island (maybe a little too reminiscent of that last one according to some eagle eyed movie nerds). Since Bay actually filmed these scenes in the latest and greatest 3D technology, it was admittedly pretty amazing to watch. In other scenes, some of the CGI was so intensely crisp that it actually started popping too far from the live footage, making it stand out, which ruins a little of the illusion.

So the special effects is where it was at. Big robots, big explosions, big buildings falling down. Those were the high points.

The low points were pretty much everything else.

Standing in the center of all the toys-on-roids insanity is Shia LaBeouf, who in my opinion is a really good actor banking inside really bad movies. I can't fault him for taking parts in some of the biggest franchises in movie history (Transformers and Indiana Jones) because the exposure and paycheck are nearly impossible to pass up, but in terms of showing his skills as an actor, those hefty titles have done him nothing but a painful disservice. He made his big splash on the scene in the Disney TV show Even Stevens and then on the big screen in the Rear Window update, Disturbia. Many people also don't remember one of my personal favorite performances in the Project Greenlight-sponsored film, The Battle of Shaker Heights. Shia has the chops, but gets surrounded by weak emotional performances, both from CGI and real people.

In this outing, Megan Fox's eye candy character was replaced by Victoria Secret's model (and current Jason Statham girlfriend), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Whiteley was an improvement in sense of acting ability, but the part was written levels below what Fox was given. The original love interest had layers, depth and some edge, while Whiteley was given virtually no background, no emotional outlet and nothing to do but stand there and be hot. Sure, the 12-year old in the audience doesn't want or need more, but to them I say, "Go grab a Victoria Secret's catalog from your parent's bathroom and stay out of my movie."

I could go into a section now where I talk about the story, the plot lines, the connective tissue of the writing, but in reality, Bay didn't really care and neither do the younger members of the crowd, so let's just skip it.

The End of the Page recommendation: Transformers: Dark of the Moon starts slow, goes out with a bang and delivers surface entertainment for the middle school crowd.