The Big Takeaway: It wouldn’t be the summer movie season without a little Michael Bay for that ass!
The Little Takeaway: Too many characters, still kind of hard to distinguish Decepticon and Autobots let alone what they’re names are, and way too long of movie clocking in over 2 ½ hours.
Review:
There’s a scene towards the end of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in that now standard slow motion action buffet, where the beautiful Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is staring up in the sky whilst explosions go off all around her. This is when I thought that from now on, they should just copy this scene and green screen every hottie that gets cast in a Michael Bay movie from here till the end of time. You could add dynamic music and make a trailer out of it. Michael Bay could, as he’s done with a few of his thinly plotted movie, stretch it out into a full length motion picture to release this same time next year. I think it’s pure Hollywood genius!
Transformers 3 is everything you’d expect it to be: loud, rumbling, numbing and mostly boring. It’s on of those movies that plays well in theaters, but once you get it home loses something in the translation. It’s a bit long for a summer popcorn movie too. The children seated around me in the theater started losing interest about 1/3 of the way through the movie with only the fight scenes quieting them from time to time.
There’s a lot of dialogue from a lot of different people that don’t really have much to do but look intense. Ken Jeong, John Malkovich all show up for a bit of scenery chewing and nothing more, I’d like to say I would’ve enjoyed seeing more of them, but doing what exactly?
The plot of Transformers 3 involve the Autobots (the good guys, who also have a bit more color to them) doing what they do best: protecting humanity from the Decepticons (who are uniformly gray-ish which leads to confusion as to who’s who’s and what and why). It’s discovered that part of an Autobot spacecraft is hanging out on the moon with the Autobots former leader Sentinel Prime, yawningly voiced by Leonard Nimoy. The Autobots go grab him and bring him out of stasis, then the plot thickens.
Oh, there’s that Sam Witwicky fellow all futzing about worried about his new hot girlfriend who works for a car museum being letched after by Patrick Dempsey attempting to show he has range by playing a bad guy? For some reason after the last two movies, Sam can’t hang out with Optimus and the gang, and he tries to guilt trip his car about saving humanity all the time. The human part of this film, while also padding out the film, kind of seems unnecessary at this point in the franchise, I mean, at the very least, they could be CGI’d in or something.
The movie, unsurprisingly, really feels like it has sitcom plotting going on. With an A, B, and C plot going on, with near equal time given to A and B, then C just kind of being there, all in your face. The Decepticon plot (The C thread) is confusing and wholly makes no sense. Coupled with the fact that in robot form they all kind of look the same. Megatron is chained up for I guess not fully going along with Sentinel Prime’s master plan? He has to be goaded in to action by the Carly character calling him a bitch? Then he’s given a 5 second battle, only to have his spine ripped from him? The whole end of the movie’s kind of anticlimactic and pretty much the same as the last two films: Blur of robots shooting and punching each other. The Optimus Prime narrating over the end of it.
I get it, it’s a Michael Bay movie, and I should just sit back and relax, enjoy the pretty graphics and explosions, but 2 ½ hours is one of hell of a time investment, I need something to latch on to here! Transformers 3 walked a fine line between being the perfect popcorn flick the first movie was and the insulting, childish overwrought sequel. Those characters pop up from time to time, but again, I think they’re mostly there to entertain the younguns in the audience. The film series no longer has that nostalgia hit going for it, so it reeks even more of blatant paint by number film making meant to make Paramount another mound of cash.
Final Verdict: Pass
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