Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Slow down - we have to keep this up for
another 149 minutes

Grade: D

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, and Ramon Rodriguez

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

To quote Team America: World Police (and shouldn’t we all?), “Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?” It is little surprise that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is as visually bleary and bombastic as Bay’s lucrative, aesthetically-reprehensible forerunner. Or that the plotline grafted together by usual suspects Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci is as mind-numbing as it is derivative. Or that Bay’s robotic approximation of women are as panting sexpots while African-Americans are jive-talkin’, gold tooth sportin' illiterates – “We don’t really do much reading,” admits Autobot Mudflap (voiced by white actor Tom Kenney) when asked to translate some ancient Transformer hieroglyphics. Or that Bay’s inferiority-fueled self-aggrandizement again rears its pathetic head: Following his passing homage to Armageddon during the last Transformers, the sequel features a Bad Boys poster plastered on the wall of a college dorm room and Bay revisiting Pearl Harbor when Decepticons demolish the U.S. Pacific fleet.

What is notable is that it only took almost 160 days for the first anti-Obama movie to snake its way into theaters. In the midst of an ongoing mission to root out and destroy Decepticons (codenamed NEST), a new National Security advisor and presidential liaison (John Benjamin Hickey) steps brashly onto the scene, aiming to dismantle the Autobot-human cooperation agreement – with the blessing of the new president, he continuously reminds us – under the foolhardy notion that if the U.S. military, er, Autobots simply left the Middle East, er, Earth, then Al-Qaeda, er, Decepticons would stand down and leave us in peace. And, if that 2x4 metaphor doesn’t smack you in the head hard enough, Bay makes sure that, during coverage of a Decepticon offensive, a CNN television reporter conspicuously mentions that “President Obama” was being taken to an undisclosed location, and later, images of Obama are interspersed throughout a Decepticon terrorist video played over hijacked television airwaves.

It is no wonder, then, that the film’s climactic donnybrook is fought in the middle of Egypt, or that the only Arab country to come to the aid of American soldiers are the Jordanians. Still, even if Bay’s conception of geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy is as shallow as Megan Fox’s Daisy Dukes, all would be forgiven if he had the dexterity to finally rise to the occasion and put some talent where his money is.

A college-age Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and main squeeze Mikaela (Fox, seen mostly running in slow motion wearing a halter top) again find themselves in the middle of a war for universal supremacy between the Transformers, including a resurrected Megatron (Hugh Weaving) and his master, The Fallen (Tony Todd). Megatron’s mission is to track down some hidden power thingamabob that the Fallen will use to revive a machine used to destroy the Sun, while also killing Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), since only a Prime can vanquish the Fallen.

Frankly, I have seen backstories to Mario series video games with more depth than this storyline – indeed, sitting through Transformers is like watching a 150-minute long arcade game. Any serious attempt to decipher the pointless plotline, with its pilfered elements from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings, is stymied by a nonstop hail of gunfire and other assorted weaponry that riddles every scene. It’s not enough to suffer the constant barrage of shape-shifting robots veering wildly across the screen; Bay throws in helicopters, cargo carriers, fighter jets, motorcycles, battleships, submarines, tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, and an unmanned aerial drone in a pear tree.

In order to stave off mental atrophy, I allowed my thoughts to wander, considering how – in a haphazard attempt to incorporate LaBeouf’s real-life hand injury – Sam manages to locate and dress himself with gauze and finger splints seconds after being violently teleported into the Sahara desert. Sadly, I wasn’t able to miss the juvenile yuks from two instances of dogs humping each other, which mirrors a later scene in which a miniature Transformer humps Fox’s leg.

Bay’s schoolyard notion of masculinity is epitomized by his steroid-infused filmmaking style. Perhaps it also accounts for why Mikaela’s chosen insult for Sam is to repeatedly call him “such a girl,” or why Bay expresses on odd predilection for testicles: First, Mikaela’s lands atop the gonads of Sam’s roommate (Ramon Rodriguez), then an ex-government agent (John Turturro) reports the coordinates of a mammoth Decepticon while hiding in the shadow of his dangling scrotum.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen might be a fanboys’ wet dream, but most audiences will find it rather flaccid. To further the scatology, this insipid, sensorially bloated film, like its predecessor, is merde that meets the eye.

Neil Morris

Eagle Eye

This whole Wall Street bailout debate
is getting way too emotional

Grade: C –

Director: D.J. Caruso

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, and Billy Bob Thornton

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

A crackerjack premise riffing on our omnipresent technological age rapidly devolves into a pseudo-political howler in Eagle Eye, director D.J. Caruso’s latest stab at an Alfred Hitchcock revue. Caruso’s last film, Disturbia, sought to unofficially ape Rear Window. This time, Caruso cooke-up a helping of North by Northwest with a dash of The Man Who Knew Too Much thrown in for seasoning

Shia LeBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are strangers who find themselves enslaved by the techno machinations of an unknown, omnipotent force. Matters remain suitably taut while the antagonist’s identity and motives remain cloaked in mystery. Unfortunately, enter a HAL-meets-Skynet supercomputer named Aria, buried deep below the Pentagon, that starts interpreting the clause in the Declaration of Independence about “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” their government a bit too literally.

Four credited screenwriters slap on layers upon layers of twists and turns in hopes of stumbling upon a sensible endgame. The consequence is mind-numbing and riddled with plot holes, barreling headlong toward a ludicrous climax capped by a laughable, test audience-approved coda. Tack-on half-baked, ham-fisted political invectives directed against the war on terrorism and Patriot Act domestic surveillance, and you have a film geared chiefly toward paranoid conspiracy theorists. Think of it as Hitchcock…by way of Ed Wood, but with a bigger budget.

Neil Morris