Transformers: Dark of the Moon – It did suck

I’m aware that this is the third review of the new Transformers film on here, but I think both of my fellow Clackers were far too generous. I refuse to credit director Michael Bay with any more intelligence than he attributed to his audience.

Dark of the Moon (whatever that means) opens with what looks like a weird episode of The Kennedys, and gets worse from there. The first hour is completely pointless, achieving nothing more than making everybody hate every single character. The last hour is a boring extended action sequence, extended being the key word. And the 18 hours in between are equally painful.

I didn’t see the second film and barely remember the first, but it doesn’t seem that I’ve missed much. Within seconds of meeting Sam, played by charisma-void Shia LaBeouf, I loathed him; he’s smug and obnoxious and rude and utterly full of himself. I know he repeatedly saved the world, but I’d rather we’d all been killed by Decepticons if it meant that he’d just shut up. You’d expect that he’d be hired by the government in some capacity, being the strongest link the humans had to the Autobots, but Sam is unemployed, presumably because no sane person would hire him. This leads to a comedy sequence in which he tries to find a job. By “comedy” I mean Michael Bay-style comedy, which is like regular comedy but not funny.

Megan Fox has been replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Carly, due to Megan Fox’s complaining about Michael Bay, which leads to strange digs at her throughout the film, which seems needlessly bitchy. I won’t complain too much about Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s performance, because she is a model rather than an actress. I’ll just say that I’ve never heard an English person doing a worse English accent. Shia LaBeouf, on the other hand, is probably not a Victoria’s Secret model; he is an actor, and therefore has no excuse for his awful performance. The Transformers themselves are also generally badly played, in some cases adopting even more terrible accents. Just because you’re a robot doesn’t mean you can get away with hammy acting. Furthermore, the dialogue is constantly wooden and unrealistic. At points, pieces of coherent storyline will sneak through, presumably when Michael Bay isn’t looking. But he’s quick to stamp them out, and throw in a bizarre caption like “Middle-East: Illegal Nuclear Site.”

That’s all the best stuff about Transformers 3. The worst comes mainly in the form of misogyny. Michael Bay makes no attempt to hide his reasons for selecting Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, constantly zooming in on parts of her body like a horny teenager. The first shot of a character can tell you a lot about them; Carly is introduced with a shot of her behind. She is then made to do a lot of standing next to nice cars for the sole purpose of bad innuendo from male characters, who comment on the “curves.” Which is clever. One needs just an ounce of respect for women to see the problem with what this film reduces them to. There’s also a problem with Ken Jeong‘s character, where the joke seems to be that there is an Asian person called Wang. Really? That’s the joke? It’s unfunny at best and borderline racist at worst. Even if it isn’t offensive to Asian people, the sheer laziness is definitely offensive to the audience. Oh, and talking of borderline racism, I saw The Hangover Part II today.

But in an inadvertent act of equality, none of the characters in Transformers 3 ever feel remotely real. They’re all just there to serve whatever purpose, which in most cases seems to be to annoy everyone. We’ve all heard that joke about Avatar having 3D graphics but 2D characters. Well the characters in Transformers make the ones in Avatar look like fully rounded people.

Tranformers: Dark of the Moon was insulting on every level; appalling acting, lazy dialogue, painfully long, horrendously unfunny and morally dubious. And don’t get me started on that Linkin Park song…

Clacked by Dan Meier
on Jul 12, 2011 @ 14:50 EST5EDT