CAST: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley,John Malkovich, Patrick Dempsey, Ken Jeong, John Turturro,Frances McDormand, Peter Cullen, Tyrese Gibson; DIRECTOR: Michael Bay; WRITER: Ehren Kruger; GENRE: Action/Adventure; RUNNING TIME: 154 minutes.
Technical Assessment: 2.5
Moral Assessment: 2.5
CINEMA Rating: For viewers age 14 and above.
In Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, the story goes that when the United States put the first man on the moon in 1969, it constituted the biggest cover up the world power has ever made. The space mission was not for man to reach the moon, but for the astronauts to investigate “the Arc”, a space craft that crashed on the moon’s dark side and carried robots from a different solar system into ours. These are the Decepticons—from the name alone you see they’re the bad guys. They are to be battled by the Autobots—the good robots who are returning from having been exiled by President Obama. The Autobots are to be on the side of men in the war to save the universe, and the feat, of course, requires human participation. The requirement is filled by humans led by Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), now unemployed but who is called upon to save the world again; and his girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley).
Foremost film critic Roger Ebert writing about Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon took the words out of our mouth when he said “it is a visually ugly film, with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and an inane dialog.” We couldn’t have agreed more heartily. Sitting through this potboiler for 2½ hours is pure agony. If we had a choice we wouldn’t watch it even if our next meal depended on it. Unable to piece together scene after scene of the patchwork that was masquerading as a plot, we were naturally distracted by a warped “sense of wonder”: we wondered how they designed the bad robots; we wondered how the collapsing building looked so real inside as Witwicky and girlfriend Carly rolled and slid to and fro among the office furniture without as much as suffering a bump; we wondered how the metal monster snaked its way through and around the building like an apple corer driven through a loaf of multigrain bread shedding crumbs in the process; we wondered why a respectable actor like John Malkovich would lend his name to such a silly production; we wondered why there had to be humans at all in the movie when it is simply a war between bad bots and good bots; in short, the movie fails to involve us—we would rather see its “in the making” version than the movie itself. And then there’s this beyond-ridiculous scene where two robots are fighting each other with swords! What the sshheck! Where robots are already a metal monstrosity, it would have been more infinitely interesting if director Michael Bay had made them fight with cavemen’s clubs instead, but swords? Hello! And speaking of metal upon metal, be warned that the noise level is assaultive—all that banging and clanging (for over 40 straight minutes at one point) is bound to split your eardrums if not suck out your brains altogether.
The acting, what about? Except for Malkovich, who in our books is at par with Jack Nicholsson, the actors, especially LeBeouf and Huntington-Whiteley, act as though they ate newsprint flakes for breakfast. Bleah! Disappointing, to say the least, considering the media hype preceding its opening day—this thing about Megan Fox being fired and replaced by a Victoria’s Secret model. One thing about pretty faces—they seem unable to grasp that a movie camera demands that they project a character and not themselves. In the case of Hungtington-Whiteley, many frames show her posing as though for a Vogue pictorial, plus tight jeans and stiletto heels—distracting to say the least, and definitely unforgiveable in an action-sci-fi flick.
As for meat content, Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is one huge chunk of fat. Deep-fried that translates to chicharon—too noisy to eat, and if overeaten can give you LBM. You don’t really expect a plot hazier than the Milky Way to deliver something that substantial, even as you hope for some redeeming value in the end. But if ever there is an attempt by Bay to do that, it probably just breezed through, ghostlike, as the viewer’s mental faculties are too drained and battered by the overwhelming CGI and protracted clanking combats. The movie portrays alien robots and that snaky monster as formidable enemies that have the power to annihilate the human race (at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago, anyway), while humans are denied even a semblance of dignity. In the face of all that purposeless destruction, humans survive through luck, not pluck. Think before you watch. Admission is 200 bucks at most theaters. If you can swing it, ask for a satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back option. Warning: don’t start your kids believing this is entertainment.
