Review: Transformers Dark of the Moon
By delta_ass 1 Comments
-The story here is taken from the comics and the cartoon. When the Autobots leave in a giant ark that blows up, it's from Dreamwave's first storyline in their Transformers comic. And of course, the Decepticons using a space bridge to transport Cybertron to earth is "The Ultimate Doom" episode from the G1 cartoon. So... no real complaints there, them using the actual source material is a welcome change as they've pretty much butchered everything else up to this point.
-Who the hell is Q? He's some Autobot scientist that has hair? Why would transformers have hair? And how come I've never heard of Q before? I've watched the cartoon and read the comics and the character of Q, autobot scientist, never came to my attention before. Wait a minute. Q, that's the name of the gadget scientist that equips James Bond in every Bond film, isn't it? Is that what Bay is going for here, ripping off James Bond? Why the fuck did he do that? The Autobots already have Ratchet and Wheeljack in the cartoons to outfit them with gear, there was no reason to make up some new lame character.
-The comic relief, terrible as it is, comes from the two small robots Wheels and Brains. I'm not sure if Wheels is still voiced by Steve Buscemi but he sounds slightly different. Anyways, these two stupid characters are awful and try their darnedest to remind you of Skids and Mudflap from the second film. They might not be quite as racially offensive, but it's a near thing. Even viewing them without the racial stereotypes, they're just plain annoying as hell and contribute nothing else to the film. Also, Brains for some inexplicable reason has troll doll hair on his head. Again, why would Transformers have hair? These are robots.
-Shia LaBeouf screams and acts like a fucking idiot. This does not make him a good protagonist.
-The comedy in this film is bizarre and off-putting, in other words... typical Bay. Ken Jeong of course has to straddle Shia LaBeouf in a restroom stall and call himself "Deep Wang." Of course he does. Of course Bay finds this funny. In fact, this is almost the exact same scenario that Bay gave us in The Island, where it was Steve Buscemi with Ewan McGregor. An unsuspecting innocent walks in on them and thinks they're gay lovers. I'm not saying this sort of situation is unimaginably lacking in comedic value, but the over-the-top manner that Jeong acts just made me feel so embarrassed and disgusted for humanity that the possibility of humor never arrived. Ken Jeong, man, he needs to try and think up some new schtick, because it's just getting old. Cringeworthy comedy is not necessarily a bad thing but it didn't work for me here.
-With the way Michael Bay shoots her, Rosie Huntington-Whitely is not nearly as ugly as she looked in some promo stills. However... her acting sucks and she's still not as attractive as Megan Fox.
-Optimus Prime appears to be a murderous psychopath. I'm not even sure if he's better then the Decepticons. "We'll kill them all." "Let's find out." Whatever happened to the Optimus Prime from the cartoon? That's the one that us kids all looked up to. The Optimus Prime here is either wimpering for his life or slicing and dicing everything in sight like a cold-blooded murderer. We bounce around from one extreme to the other, never quite coming into harmonious alignment with Peter Cullen's majestic and inspiring voice, perfect as always. Don't get me wrong, his voice is great, just not what he's made to say in that voice.
-Optimus is also equipped with his trailer now, which is an improvement over the past films which always had him trailer-less. Here, it finally completes his vehicle profile and also serves a useful purpose as his equipment locker and battle station.
-Why would the Decepticons use humans to rebuild Cybertron? How does that even work? Human slaves are going to be starving and beaten, how are they going to be able to rebuild a totally alien mechanical planet? The Cybertronians are highly advanced technological beings, right? How would 6 billion humans know how to repair this advanced technological planet? Hell, 4 billion humans on earth probably don't even have access to wikipedia yet. I mean, if you want human slaves to build ancient pyramids by dragging giant blocks up ramps, I guess we could probably do that. But I imagine Cybertron has completely alien and sophisticated systems that make up its structure. This seems like an impossible task for us measly humans, not to mention we're also about 10 times too small.
-Michael Bay shoots the first few scenes of Carly like a Victoria's Secret commercial. It's just shameless and embarrassing, you're sitting there wondering why you feel an urge to buy a negligee.
-The movie makes the Transformers look incredibly weak in some action scenes. You've got snipers with sniper rifles shooting out their eyeballs, and sappers just planting C4 and blowing up their legs. This is just pathetic, right? These Transformers are supposed to be huge metallic creatures with advanced armor and technology and yet they seem completely helpless at times.
-Tomahawk cruise missiles maneuver nimbly through bridges and perfectly strike moving Decepticons, even though they're meant to strike static targets like airfields and bunkers. I doubt these missiles are capable of being directly guided as accurately as they're depicted here.
-Bumblebee is mute again. Why the fuck is he still mute in the third film, when he regained his voice at the end of the first film? Yet once again, we get the tired soundbite treatment, where he communicates with random radio and music clips. Why can't he talk yet, what the hell's wrong with his voice? I don't understand.
-And why are the Decepticons in Chicago piloting these aerial vehicles? Aren't these transformers? Why do they need to ride in vehicles, when they all have vehicle modes? There's no need to get in and pilot jets, when you can just change into a jet form, right? Michael Bay completely misses the whole point of the Transformers. When you have transformation abilities and can become a jet, there's no reason to have to pilot a jet.
-Optimus Prime gets his jetpack and wings from his trailer and flies around chopping down the metallic spikey worm of death. Now, this looks great from a visual perspective, but... then he ends up getting tangled up in some construction wires for about half an hour. A giant worm with tentacles poses little danger to him, but he just can't seem to get out of those darn tangled wires. This doesn't seem possible, since we know Optimus is equipped with two Energon blades on his arms.
-Why did the red Ferrari Autobot have a thick Italian accent? He's called Dino, but I don't know Autobot named Dino. There were the Dinobots, but they transformed into dinosaurs, not red sports cars.
-And speaking of accents, Ironhide still has that awful British accent. But Ironhide never had a British accent in the cartoon, he had more of a gruff southern accent. This made sense because Ironhide was supposed to be the old warhorse veteran who had a lot of experience. The British accent makes him far too dainty.
-And the Wreckers were just annoying. They all had ridiculous accents. Again, I just don't understand this fascination with accents. Humans have accents, but there's no reason the Transformers need to, they're from an alien fucking planet made out of machines. They should all be able to talk in perfect English.
-The Wreckers are all cars outfitted with human made weaponry for some strange reason. If these Transformers are highly advanced aliens with superior weaponry, why are they equipped with human-made .50 cal machine guns and General Electric miniguns? Why would they want to sue our primitive lowtech guns? Shouldn't they be outfitted with their cybertronian lasers and shit? Again, Michael Bay doesn't seem to understand Transformers.
-Speaking of the weapons, I found the sounds of the weaponsfire of the Transformers disappointingly weak. They either go "poof poof" or "pewt pewt pewt" which just sounds really inconsequential and lame. You see these huge metallic guns and you expect really big beefy sounds but they just sound like kids making laser sounds while playing with Fisher Price toys.
-And why did all the Transformers spew red and yellow... bile and bleed red blood? You can see Starscream spitting yellow bile all over Sam. Aren't these mechanical robots? Why do they have spit at all? And the Decepticons seemed to bleed red liquid in the confrontation with Ironhide. But why would Transformers have blood? Maybe you could have some sparks to show damage, but don't give them red blood, they aren't organic beings.
-And why did Ironhide and Sideswipe drop their guns when they were in a Mexican standoff with two Decepticons?
-Why did Shockwave have a giant metallic Dune sandworm with tentacles trying to tentacle rape everything? I've watched the Transformers cartoon and Shockwave just turned into a space gun, he never commanded a giant robotic worm. Where did this bullshit come from?
-Leonard Nimoy's Sentinel Prime ruins Spock's classic line from Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan.
-Sentinel Prime's motivation makes no sense. Why would the leader of the Autobots turn traitor and join the Decepticons? Aren't these Prime leaders chosen because they're the best of the Autobots or something? Seems strange to choose someone that actually turns out to be a psychopathic traitor and mass murderer. The character turn seemed to be in the film only to elicit shock and surprise at the event, without any real reason or explanation.
-And if Sentinel Prime was working with the Decepticons all along, even back on Cybertron... why the hell did the Decepticons shoot down the ship he was on? Was that also part of the plan? I don't believe Autobots shot down his craft, so it must've been the Decepticons.
-Megatron is apparently now a crappy garbage truck and wears a ratty dirty hood. It looks terrible and makes no sense. Megatron in the G1 cartoon never wore a cape or hood, none of the transformers wore clothing. And wasn't he a tank of some sort in the previous film, why would he suddenly downgrade from a tank to a garbage truck? And if he was capable of transforming his vehicle mode from tank to truck, why wasn't he able to fix that giant ass hole in the right side of his head? Gaining a whole new vehicle mode seems like it'd take more effort then repairing a wound, doesn't it?
-Laserbeak turned into a pink Bumblebee. Why did he turn into a pink Bumblebee? Laserbeak is white and red, he's never been pink. And why would he turn into Bumblebee? There's no connection between Laserbeak and Bumblee in the cartoon. They have nothing in common. Laserbeak just turned into a cassette tape in the cartoon, and never a Bumblebee. This is fucking idiotic. When he turns into printers and monitors, well... that at least makes some sense, he's hiding in plain sight. That makes sense for a Transformers movie. But a pink Bumblebee having tea with a little girl while waiting to assassinate her father makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Also, did anybody else find the editing kinda strange in that scene, it seemed to black out for a few seconds.
-Laserbeak also turns into a feathered robotic bird that talks. This makes no sense, because Laserbeak never talked in the cartoon, he just took his surveillance pictures and reported to Megatron without uttering speech. he also never had feathers, or this long reticulating spine with spikes shooting out of every vertebrae.
-Soundwave is also in this film, and not just humping a spy satellite like he was in Revenge of the Fallen. Here, he has a mouth instead of a faceplate like he did in the cartoon. Why? Why did he have to have a mouth? Soundwave's classic look had the faceplate and looked great, there was no reason to alter his appearance. He also turns into a luxury car of some sort, instead of a cassette player. Again, Michael Bay misses the point. Soundwave in the cartoon had command of numerous minions that all transformed into his cassettes. Now, I'm not saying that Soundwave necessarily has to be a cassette player in this day and age, but as it is... how the fuck is he supposed to command a bunch of minions when he's just a fucking luxury car? A luxury car doesn't command jack shit. The symbiotic relationship between cassette player and cassettes made sense back in the cartoon, and they should've had something similar here.
-Invoking the Challenger disaster in this film is awful. The film also uses 9/11 imagery blatantly. Sam and Epps are entering Chicago while this sad and soulful song plays. They pass hurt and distraught civilians walking out of the warzone. This is all too familiar 9/11 imagery and it feels cheap and insulting. Not saying that you can't ever show a city get blown up in an action film after 9/11, but this was just tasteless and crass.
-Oh god, why is Turturro's aide flamboyantly gay?
-Why do the Autobots have to have their Ark attached to the space shuttle? What, do they need the space shuttle? Why would the Autobots with their technological superiority require our dinky human-built shuttle?
-At some points, the film is merely mediocre and overly manufactured instead of actively slamming you over the head with its offensively stupifying idiocy. For example, when Sam and Turturro are watching the Transformers preparing to leave Earth on their Ark, with mournful, manipulative music wafting through the background. Sure, it's sappy and melodramatic and fake and cheesy, but it's actually not that bad compared to the rest. You just sit there and breathe a sigh of relief that at least you're not getting subjected to Shia screaming, or the two small idiot bots jabbering on, or something else horrible.
-I'll say this for it though, the film does show the money all onscreen. For a 200 million dollar film, it looks at times like a 400 million dollar film. Truly, ILM and Michael Bay have put recent efforts like Green Lantern to shame, at least in the visual department. The CGI animators who meticulously crafted these incredible scenes are to be commended, though the art directors who came up with the art style for the Transformers have once again designed incredibly disappointing piles of metal shards with millions and millions of pieces of metal spikes and hooks and and all manner of buzzsaws. This failure in art direction is most apparent in the look of the Shockwave sandworm creature, which seems to be composed of millions of gray metal hooks and shards. Frankly, it's a boring mechanical tube of diahrrea.
-And how strong must Carly have been to actually tear the foot off of that stuffed bunny? I mean damn, that was a big ass bunny, wasn't it? It's like one of those big stuffed animals you see at carnivals, it's fucking huge. She tore that one foot off in about three seconds. Are they really that poorly made? Carly doesn't look very strong, she's looks really skinny, cause she's a supermodel.
-Why does Megatron just sit in a pile of garbage for the last third of the film? He gets bashed around by Sentinel prime and just decides to give up and cry himself to sleep in this dirty ass alley?
Ultimately... it's better then the second movie? But that's not saying much, is it? The entire first half of the film is an exercise in repeatedly turning your head, shaking it in disgust and embarrassment, and cursing out loud. Or at least for me it was. The kind of stuff you see in this movie is stuff you just can't see anywhere else. There are CGI effects you just can't see anywhere else. But there are also scenes with Ken Jeong and Shia LaBeouf you just can't see anywhere else, and wouldn't want to.
3/10