After the insane excesses of the second Transformers film, I was skeptical that Michael Bay would be able to actually follow himself. That film shattered the boundaries of good taste and discretion in spectacular ways, bombarding the audience with a toxic mix of explosions, retrograde humor (including arguably the two most racist African-American caricatures to make it into movie theaters since the 30s), and Megan Fox. The last of these has, sadly, departed completely, though the pain of her absence is alleviated somewhat by the addition of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. More surprisingly, the film tones down the racism and misogyny of its successor to a considerable degree--don't get me wrong, the "humor" here still has both feet planted soundly and proudly in the gutter, but it fails to ever really be genuinely offensive.
And yet, despite this dialing back in key areas, the film still manages to be basically the biggest, loudest, longest, dumbest thing ever produced by mankind. If the first two films were amplifiers turned up to 11, this one is set at 11 thousand. The action here comes fast and furious, and sometimes there are stretches of 15 minutes or more in which the sounds of gunfire and explosions batter you without respite. When you combine this with the fact that all of these action scenes focus on giant robots made out of overwhelmingly detailed CGI, you end up with a film-going experience that is absolutely relentless as it hammers your synapses and feeds its loud noises and bright colors directly into the brain's pleasure center.
This sense of total disorientation brought about by the action scenes is further compounded by the film's absolutely bonkers screenplay. The plot alone (if a narrative action this paper-thin can even be given that term) is pretty nuts in and of itself, involving as it does the moon landing, NASA cover-ups, a teleportation device elegantly referred to as a "space bridge," the destruction of roughly 1/3 of downtown Chicago, and an attempt by the evil robots to transport their dead planet into earth's atmosphere and enslave the entire human race to rebuild it. But this gives only a small glimpse into the script's total insanity. Where the film really shines is not in its ostensible main storyline, but in the truly bizarre, random, and well-nigh hallucinatory episodic sub-plots that comprise probably 75% of its run-time. Here is a short selection of the things you will see if you attend a showing of Transformers: Dark of the Moon:
*Archival footage of JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon and Walter Cronkite
*Barack Obama played by an extra who looks nothing like him
*Seriously I think they just grabbed a black guy from catering and had him stand at the back of the shot
*Buzz Aldrin
*Shots of what is purportedly Washington DC that include skyscrapers in the background. THERE ARE NO SKYSCRAPERS IN WASHINGTON DC
*Shia Labeouf uttering the line "you look like an Asian Colonel Sanders"
*John Malkovic playing a crazy CEO guy who disappears completely 1/3 of the way through the film
*BUZZ ALDRIN
*Ken Jeong assaulting Shia Labeouf in a bathroom stall
*A pink robot having tea time with a little girl
*Patrick Dempsey as a bad guy
*a really weird Bill O'Reilly cameo
*John Turturo's ambiguously gay Dutch personal assistant who is also a trained assassin and computer hacker
*Robots blowing up a "secret nuclear site" in a location identified on-screen only as "Middle East"
*Frances McDormand as a castrating government lady who carries important documents around in Louis Vuitton and Hermes bags
*Megatron (the bad guy robot) hanging out like a wandering nomad on the African savanna
*Optimus Prime (the good guy robot) musing on the beauty of earth as he gazes lovingly at a sunset
And so much more! Because almost all of this happens in the first hour of this 157 minute monument to bad taste.
Whatever else one may think of the Transformers movies, it is hard not to admire the gumption and the willingness to go all in at every moment which is their ultimate and defining characteristic. An exercise in absolute and total crassness, they confront us with our own basest impulses and desires. Proving that excitement and tedium are closer together than we ever imagined, the films take the standard thrilling ingredients of a summer blockbuster and, through the force of sheer overwhelming repetition, turn them into instruments of mind-numbing torture. As you sit in the theater and stare into the bottomless abyss of the lowest common denominator, you begin to ask yourself a series of questions: "Why did I spend money on this?" "What made me want to see this?" "Why am I here?" "When will this stop?" "What is wrong with society?" "What is wrong with me?" But this questioning eventually ceases, as the last of your critical thinking capabilities are pounded into submission and you are left only to stare in mute, glassy-eyed awe at the film's terrible splendor. When you gaze for long into the dark of the moon, the dark of the moon gazes also into you.
