Why would I, in my right mind, go out to watch a Transformers movie? Especially after I only managed about half an hour of the second installment. Especially after I said I’d only watch it if I was forcefully dragged into an auditorium, strapped on the seat and my eyes held up with tape. Well, that kinda happened.
I went in voluntarily, I wasn’t strapped to the chair and neither was my eyes held back. In fact, I was actually excited. That’s because I paid and actually was holding X-Men: First Class tickets. After the usual very crappy ads (how do you make a TV ad by just panning over the poster?), that weird Pearl & Dean music that no one knows is about, we sat in the dark for a while before someone came in announce something no one heard but everyone understood that there was a scratch on the X-Men CD or something of the sort. Then he disappeared.
He later came back. This time, we could hear what he was saying. He offered us Transformers 3 instead of X-Men. Just as I was about to get up in protest, I’d even started chanting, “SUCK MY DICK!,” my efforts were drowned out by a cheer.
Here I was thinking that I was sitting with a bunch of grown-ups who had fought of pressure and intimidation by the hundreds of meatheads lining up for Transformers on the other screen. You know how awkward it is standing on a line with four people when the next line has about 50 people?
Anyway, that’s how my fate was sealed. I realized that maybe God just wanted me to watch Dark of the Moon, so I reluctantly embraced God’s purpose for me that evening.
They started playing the movie before handing out the 3-D glasses. The movie finally started with the Moon Landing episode. Actual footage of the Landing is shuffled with Bay’s dramatized version, suggesting the mission was all about inspecting a crashed bot ship on the dark side of the moon.
This is not the only time Transformers 3 juxtaposes its storyline between a historical event. They also use the Chernobyl disaster site as a prop for another sequence to promote a conspiracy theory. Any attempts Transformers makes at making this one a brainy one ends there. Just like in the second one, things just happen. There is really no tangible plot and not a single sub-plot.
Through their conversations though, you learn that Sam doesn’t have a job despite having saved the world twice. And he also has a new girlfriend, that’s about it (they don’t forget to take a swipe at Megan Fox). The story is populated with the characters of John Malkovich, Ken Jeong, Patrick Dempsey and Frances McDormand, among the usual crowd, the only one worth noting being the always cool John Turturro and his bodyguard/PA, played by Alan Tudyk.
Other than the fairly clever Moon Landing plot, the rest is the usual Sam running around trying to convince the authorities that some major shit’s about to go down and him being ignored and him getting Bumblebee boners along the way.
If Transformers is one thing, it’s a huge commercial for…everything. From Lenovo monitors which are in virtually every indoor scene to a very brazen plugging of some. Mercedes SLS-AMG, I actually remember that off the top of my head because they not only mentioned it, they made sure they even gave us stats about the car. There’s a scene which is probably the worst product placement sequence I’ve seen in a movie. Mearing, in her suit walks with her team, she suddenly stops, kicks off her shoes, then someone places some multi-colored Nike sneakers on the floor. Mearing puts them on and continues walking *end scene* There are countless others: a shot of Dempsey’s dealership and in it, logos of probably every American car company, etc.
There’s not much to say about the acting. Except for Tyrese, no one was actually bad. It just felt like the characters were mismatched, or just in the wrong movie altogether. Jeong and Malkovich looked like they were in a different movie, a better one. And everyone else was in another movie. It’s like, you wouldn’t put Pee Wee Herman and Kristen Stewart in the same movie, right? John Turturro as usual stood out alongside Alan Tudyk.
Rosie Huntington-Whitely was just there, reading the lines she rehearsed. She also ran beside Sam for some part of the movie. From the scene where she’s introduced, you can tell she’s in the movie for her curves. She sexily enters and exits the Mercedes, stands over the camera at the perfect upskirt angle and so on and so forth. That’s when you get to understand Megan Fox’s alleged reasons for leaving the franchise.
The 3-D is okay, not eye-gouging as I expected it to be considering the action-heavy nature of the movie. Thing is, I found it unnecessary. Except for the title sequence and some other cool sequence which I can’t remember, there was nothing else of note. Which is a shame, I mean, Transformers looks like the kind of movie that should kick in the format. Thank God, Fox doesn’t surcharge on 3-D tickets. Otherwise, I would’ve considered it a waste.
Now to the direction. Transformers is, first and foremost, a Michael Bay film. His signature is written all over it. From cars rolling when they haven’t been as much as touched, falling buildings and needless destruction of property. If anyone else was to take over, it would look totally different. Instead of studying Transformers and finding possible ways of execution, he’s taken his style and pasted it onto Transformers. This has totally skewed the creator’s intentions and even the laws of physics and common sense.
You don’t have to be a geek to know that robots are very mechanical. They move rigidly. Unlike humans, they can’t do anything further than their programming. Humans have muscles, which form over time and it is within our power to develop them further to do something someone else can’t do like, say, run 100 meters in less than 10 seconds.
I understand Autobots and Decepticons are alien life forms but still, they are cars that turn mechanically, not magically, into robots. It’s looked very stupid when Optimus Prime did that backward spinning, kell-’em-all stunt almost effortlessly like he/it had taken a mixture of karate and ballet lessons.
Even the original cartoons moved realistically. I understand that they are an intelligent form, which explains how they can speak English, but why is there one with a Japanese accent. In the first movie, there was one with an African American accent. The villain of this installment, Sentinel, is aged in a very human way. It has wrinkles, scraggly hair and a gruff voice. What next? Poor eyesight.
There’s a scene where some Autobots are captured. They’re huddled around and forced to kneel, that seriously does not make sense to me. Shouldn’t there be a switch you turn or a fuse you remove to disable a bot? Why do Bumblee’s eyes water when he’s feeling emotional? As @Radacque asked, how come he can take bolts out of his ‘body’ and throw them around and not be affected? Enough about the bots abilities and design, there are too many questions. I didn’t understand why the Decepticons were killing off innocent humans despite saying they needed people to rebuild their world? There are also some really corny lines, especially between Prime and Sentinel. I don’t get why bots have to dispel their wisdom on each other as they fight.
There was one cool scene though: when the main characters are very conveniently stuck on the top floor of a building that’s half-keeled and shockwave, a killer bot is approaching. The following sequence is probably the film’s best part, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. One problem: There’s a continuity error though, for some reason, they end up at a point where they’re still on top of the building though they shouldn’t be. You kinda have to watch it to understand.
For the first time ever, I actually kept looking at the time, wondering why the film so long. Even Dark Knight and Inception, which are probably the longest films I went to watch, I never realized how long they were until I got out. It just seems like Bay thought of a battle scene and constructed a whole film around it. I didn’t see why we had to wait for so long because no coherent plot built up to the moment. And even the final battle, let alone Optimus Prime’s much hyped ‘ice-skate’ sequence, was cool enough to sit through the whole thing. Do not expect awesomeness, go to Transformers with an open mind. In fact go in with a mind so open, intelligence has escaped it. But even then, I don’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
cinymou 