Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Ice Cream Rating: Butterscotch
Director: Michael Bay (Transformers, Pearl Harbour)
Top stars: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whitely and Tyrese Gibson
Running time: 157 minutes

Transformers 1 was awesome!!! Transformers 2 (Revenge of the Fallen), even though it won ‘Worst Film of the Year’ and was bombed by the critics, still blew my mind and I remember expecting all the cars on the road to unfold into superbots the day after I watched it. So when I sat down to see Transformers 3, I already had my “I just saw an awesome film” Facebook status ready. Considering how prejudiced I was to like the film, and how much I ended up being annoyed by it - should give you a fair idea about Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Disclaimer: I have tried hard to rein in the negative adjectives in this review.

Let’s get the plot out of the way. The story is basically a re-hash of the second film. The Autobots find a long lost Cybertronian ship, carrying technology important for the defeat of Megatron. They also realize that the humans had already discovered the ship on the moon during the Apollo mission. (If Autobots are as technically advanced as the films make them out to be, how did earthlings manage to find the ship before they did, and hide the intelligence all these years? Yes, gaping holes!) Beyond that, it’s just a montage of Megatron’s scariness, crumbling buildings and lots of mechanical parts.

Why is Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) so whiny all the time? How did Carly Spencer’s (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) hair go from straight to perfect curls in consecutive days of captivity? And what is with the psychotic behavior of Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong)?! Not to mention the eyebrow raising weirdness of Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich), the boss. Throw in a peevish Mearing (Francis McDormand), a crazy Simmons (John Tuturro) and his German side-kick and we have the perfectly harassing Transformers parody. The entire film is an ensemble of caricatures that start to intensely irritate you in the course of 2 hours and 37 minutes.

I will not deny that the special effects are exhilarating and in some scenes, genius. But is that enough to float the third part of a series in which the previous films also had amazing sequences? No. Dark of the Moon drowns in its paper-thin plot and indifferent actors.

It might seem mean of me to pick on one person among the entire incompetent cast (save Patrick Dempsey, who is fairly irreproachable). But when I found myself thinking, “Megan Fox’s performance had more depth”, I knew that Ms. Rosie Hunting-Whiteley was the worst thing that happened to this film. All she does is look remarkably envious in her low cut dresses and high heels. Shia LaBeouf deserves better. Atleast, Sam Whitwicky, the guy who’s saved our planet twice before, does.

So Michael Bay, if you want to carry on with the Transformers series and make films that we all would like to watch and re-watch, bring back Megan Fox, re-orient Shia LaBeouf and get a new background scorer and all might be forgiven.

More on Transformers: Dark of the Moon: Christian Spotlight, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, Metacritic, Wikipedia