Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

The Autobots learn of a Cybertronian spacecraft hidden on the Moon, and race against the Decepticons to reach it and to learn its secrets.

The Transformers series has been the target of consistent bashings due to the qaultiy of them but part of it seems to come at the director Michael Bay rather than at the film itself. The first Transformers was an over the top action filled bundle of fun. Sure it was never going to win any awards but at least you had a good time with it. Then came the sequel and we all know how the giant mess ended up turning out, even the staff that worked on that movie said it was terrible. With that in mind, promises were made to fix it the problems for the third installment. While it’s a vast improvement over the second, it still feels diluted with too much nonsense.

For a movie called Transformers, they sure do try and force feed the humans upon you. I understand they are trying to go for some kind of emotional balancing point that connects the two races, but nobody really wants to see that if it’s done poorly as it is here. Outside of Sam Witwicky (and even a lot of people hate him), not a single character seems to be developed enough, but that’s probably because nobody else is the least bit interesting. The new love interest, Carly, does a better job than Megan Fox at creating chemistry, but at least they let Fox actually contribute in the fight a bit. Here all Rosie Huntington-Whiteley does is provide Shia LaBeouf with a damsel to rescue. Somehow John Turturro continues to get written into the script as Agent Simmons. He was never funny to begin with and continues to be absolutely useless. Throw in some new faces such as Dempsey, Malkovich, McDormand, and Ken Jeong and you have the rest of a long line of miscasted or poorly written characters; it’s probably both but it’s a moot point by now. I think we can all agree there needs to be fewer humans in the franchise.

Moving onto the Transformers, it’s a very vast improvement over the second one. Gone are the terrible twin robots, gone is that fragile unfunny old looking rust bucket, and gone is the terrible villain, The Fallen. That alone is addition by subtraction. Bay does a much better job at allowing you to identify which each robot was and toned down a lot of the awful jokes they told. The battles and action pieces are superb to watch and some are the most exciting ones I’ve seen on screen, but each one is let down when they suddenly just jump into the next scene. It makes you wonder if they forgot to add something in-between the two scenes. The villains here are handled good up until the ending. You’d think with three of the most powerful Transformers shown on screen would be a long epic battle but if you check your phone for the time, you might actually miss it. The inconsistencies each battle is never usually talked about, but when this is supposed to be the last in the series, you should go all out. Instead they seemed to rush the ending despite its 155 minute runtime. You would never guess this was supposedly the last of the series.  

Transformers: Dark of the Moon manages to fix a lot of things, but the second one was so broken, there were still a slew of problems that worked its way into the finale holding it down from being as enjoyable as the first one. It’s a ton better than the sequel but you’d hardly call that a compliment. Transformer fans will be happy to get their fix in, but for the rest of us, this will end up being just another typical summer blockbuster that makes more than it should. The best compliment I can give to this film and Michael Bay is that at least this one was watchable. If you enjoyed the first film, this leans more towards that one then the second, but you should walk in already knowing what to expect.

Overall Score: 5.5/10