Climbing Higher Pictures

The Autobots and Decepticons are back for one final round of metal crushing mayhem. I’m just humoring myself if I think you’re bothering to read this. The review’s down there, take a look.

Transformers Dark of the Moon Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B-

It’s better than the second one. That was immediately my first takeaway after walking out of the theater from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Where the original had managed to succeed, Revenge of the Fallen had miserably failed, and going into round 3, the general consensus was that it was all but certain to top the expectations established by its awful predecessor. Michael Bay has managed to craft one of his most impressive pieces of visual eye-candy to date, and though it still appears that the creators are unaware of what truly made the first film work, they’ve gotten much closer to re-creating the energy level and impact of the first installment. This is popcorn filmmaking at its most grandiose, a combination of gigantic action sequences, broad and largely (this time at least) inoffensive humor, and a love story that carries about as much water as a strainer. However, when it works, it works surprisingly well, managing to incorporate some of the heart of the original but dragging along a lot of the plot incongruities and inconsistencies of the second.

Now, for the first big question mark that most audience members will have… how was Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in her first starring role? In a word, fine. She doesn’t have the relatable qualities that Megan Fox displayed in the first film, and her British accent helps to keep her involvement with Sam to more of a trophy girlfriend status. She’s gorgeous, so we get that part of why he would want to be with her, but as far as falling in love with her… not so much. It works because she’s an already established socialite who’s trying to get Sam to make something of himself now that he doesn’t have to run around saving the world. We believe her, because it feels kind of like the life of a Victoria Secret model, and it may be the only part she’s really capable of playing. Bay photographs her in much the same way as he shoots his lingerie ads, and it appears that making already beautiful women appealing is squarely in his strike zone.

The 3D element of Transformers feels like something the series should have had from the get-go, and if there’s one filmmaker after James Cameron who could create a technical showcase for the format, it’s Bay. Everything looks uniformly stunning, and the added depth actually helps the audience to differentiate individual robots and makes the transformations all the more impressive. The film lives and breathes in a 3D space, and there are shots in this movie that you will not truly appreciate unless you see it in 3D. We’ll see what happens when the box office numbers for the 3D screenings come in next weekend, but I have a sneaky suspicion that this is the kind of flick that could reverse the downward trend in 3D ticket sales. It’s a rollercoaster, particularly in its much ballyhooed hour-long Chicago finale, and you’ll be holding onto the arms of your theater chair for dear life.

What really drags the film down is its all-over-the-place pacing. The opening is a tightly wound history lesson montage that sets everything up excellently, but pretty much from there on out, it begins a slow unravel. Scenes that should have life hang dead and otherwise basic conversations have the cutting of a Nascar race, not to mention the incorporation of sporadic cuts to black that really do nothing more than make the film feel like a low budget TV movie which didn’t have the money to shoot some scenes in their entirety. Plot holes emerge soundlessly from the woodwork on fairly regular intervals as well. Not gaping unresolved questions like Revenge of the Fallen, just spatial incongruities that throw you out of the movie. One scene in particular has Bumblebee hurtling in to rescue Sam, only to be, not 15 seconds later, captured and collected with a bunch of other Autobots several blocks away. It’s one thing to cut a sequence down for time, and another to remove large portions of important cause and effect that make a scene work chronologically.

The first Transformers may have had a lot of action moments, but each one was integrated into the plot of the film with clear, specific objectives that were set up and paid off in a classic storytelling way. Revenge of the Fallen was the opposite, a collection of sequences strung together by a barely comprehensible backstory. Dark of the Moon falls somewhere in between, having key characters simply vanish for long stretches of time, only to re-appear after they would have most likely been needed the most. Optimus in particular has a habit of being off somewhere doing something else at the worst possible times, letting his team get their asses kicked while he goes joyriding or something. There’s never a good reason for him not to be there, and a lack of motivation makes the plot contrivances stand out. We know why he couldn’t be there, because that would have caused the thing that occurred to not happen, but you can’t just remove him from the equation every time you want to put a character in danger. Other times, the sequence feels integral to the plot, and you start getting the same adrenaline rush the first film delivered. It’s just disappointing that it’s so sporadic, and I worry that other reviewers simply lowered their expectations to such a point from the second outing that they’ve forgotten how good the first film really was.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon delivers everything you could ask for from a summer blockbuster, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission. It is not a disappointment from any standard other than storytelling, and apparently the average audience member cares even less about that these days than they did when the second film grossed $800 million worldwide. Is it the finale that fans of the series always dreamed for? Meh. It’s alright, and that’s such a huge step up from the last film that it practically deserves a medal. It only disappoints me because I can see what it could have been, and what the fans truly deserved. However, the way we’re going this summer, this one is at least worth a ticket, and that’s saying a lot.