Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) Review

Dark of the Moon is one hell of a boring piece of crap movie, which serves to only emphasise Bay’s flaws as a director and… Nothing else.

Everything bad I had to say about the previous two films is double downed on here – the unending runtime, the stereotypes, the propaganda, the horny cinematography, the noise. It’s all there.

But at least the first one was a coherant action blockbuster where not every character was a copy pasted version of one and other. And at least the second one, for it’s many, deep running flaws, was such a spectacular failure that you couldn’t look away from it. But there’s nothing spectacular about Dark of the Moon. Even in it’s failure it’s sort of mindling and pathetic, like the protagonist of a British sitcom. It never wants to admit it’s story ended an hour ago, that it can’t fit in more characters, that it hasn’t blown the army hard enough yet, that can look at any part of the lead actress aside from her arse, or that it can’t do any of these things any less coherantly than before. It’s on an unending mission to prove that, yes, it can be worse.

The story is about a Transformer on the moon who comes down, teams up with Megatron and tries to teleport Cybertron – the Transformer planet – to Earth. And then they fight and the film ends.

Shia LaBeouf has thrown it in and seems hardly interested. Megan Fox is gone and some other poor soul, Rosie Huntington-Whitley, has become the subject of Bay’s male gaze. Even Optimus Prime has given in. So much for fighting fair. So much for being the bigger man in a conflict. No, in this film Optimus Prime is so struck by overbearing themes of post 9/11 trauma that he shotguns the surrendering villain, pleading for his life, straight through the belly after giving a speech about American values.

Okay, but I do have to admit that was funny. Unintentionally funny, yes. I almost spit my drink out like a cartoon character watching that. But in this absolute snooze-fest, watching the (not) robot US president personally execute the (not) robot bin laden was pretty hilarious.

So the big question is, would I recommend a nearly three hour film on the premjse that ten whole seconds of it will make you laugh for reasons it never intended? No. Dark of the Moon is a mostly miserable experience that grinds you down so effectively that what few mindless action scenes are in there will fail to draw you back in, regardless of how rediculous they become.