Transformers: Dark of the Moon is the third movie in this live action series and the story here this time is that back in the 60's, an Autobot spacecraft fleeing Cybertron crashes on the Dark Side of the Moon, creating the famous space race of that decade, in the present day however Sam played by Shia LaBeouf has moved to Washington to start a new job and has a new girlfriend Carly played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, but the Autobots may need his help again as rumours fly around regarding the return of some old foes.
Dark of the Moon was seen as director Michael Bay and company's attempt to make up to the fans the failure of the last film in the series, 2009's Revenge of the Fallen which had nothing of any worth to go with it apart from a fight sequence in a forest, as a result this was the one movie I had been dreading so far all year, but was I right to expect the worst or did I expect a pleasant surprise.
Well, first off I'll start with the good stuff and that is twofold: First is the larger allotment of screen time given to Optimus Prime voiced again by Peter Cullen, this time around he's not used just to narrate the film or provide a fight sequence here or there, this time it really feels like he has a part to play in the storyline of the film as well as giving us the aforementioned narration which Cullen has done very well throughout all three films plus the badass fight scenes which are nothing short of fantastic to watch, mainly because we care about Prime as a character and want to see him triumph as "One shall Stand, One shall Fall."
The second positive is that there was a genuine attempt to atone for the mistakes of the last film by actually attempting to write a plotline for the film, the first half of the film for the most part is somewhat interesting as it involves the whole moon landing thing mentioned in my plot synopsis.
However, the film also has a lot of shortcomings, pretty much all of which occur in the latter two thirds of the film, how do I talk about thee, well let thee count the ways in no particular order.
1. Carly herself: Though Huntington is a vast improvement on Megan Fox, she's also not that much better either as she parades through the film looking like a 35 year old fashion model on vacation with Sam being the 21 year old kid she picked up and bonked more times than a worn and very old shagged carpet plus her British accent just gets grating after a while and she turns into nothing more than a plot device with tits and ass that just decides to phone in the whole thing, smegging hell.
2. No Heart: Pretty much the last hour of the film is the battle in Chicago between the Decepticons and the resistance and with the exception of the final showdown with Optimus and a few shots of fighters on the attack, it all gets monotonous, loud (so very loud) and boring as most of it is BWAMMMP, SHREECH, BOOOOOOMMMMPPP turned up to 15 and given audio enhancement steroids, it all gets too much after a time and it feels like you've had 10 decibels ripped off your sound index when it's all over.
3. The Role of the Decepticons: Ah yes, the dreaded Decepticons and Quite frankly, yet again they're given nothing to do apart from setup the action and also yet again, I was reminded how Hugo Weaving makes nothing work with Megatron, with some of his lines screaming for Frank Welker to say them so that you get some satisfaction watching him on screen, however though he does voice Soundwave as he did in the last film as well but again is given nothing to do as is Starscream, he might as well have taken a vacation, I'm sure Thundercracker or Skywarp could've filled his boots and also, what was the point of bringing in Shockwave if you're just going to shove him in there for no reason at all.
And to top it all off, watching this film kept reminding me of how good Avatar and James Cameron were, Bay is just nowhere near as good an action director as Cameron because he just piles the action on without giving any thought to making it matter or giving us a reason to care about the action on screen or for that matter letting us see who's fighting who in a clear and concise way, I know some weren't big fans of Avatar but at least Cameron took his time, wrote a storyline and characters and paced his action like a master.
But there is one last positive I must talk about and that is I didn't see it in 3D, if I did I think it would've been the equivalent of institutionalised torture, the 2D experience was more than enough for me.
So all in all, if you want a good Transformers experience then I highly recommend tracking down last year's video game War for Cybertron, that should be more than adequate, as for this movie well if you must see it then wait for the Blu-Ray release otherwise I wouldn't bother too much in going to see it, 1 out of 5.
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