TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (Michael Bay 2011)

[Chris Knipp]

Michael Bay: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011)
Review by Chris Knipp


SLIDING DOWN A SKYSCRAPER IN TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

'Transformers' is a fanboy's wet dream

For fanboys who like feature films to be expanded video games, Transformers may be the best franchise of all. It grew out of a toy line by the same name. The forerunner was Nelson Shin's 1986 Japanese anime-style film, Transformers: The Movie. The first human-plus-mechanical critters iteration came in 2007, followed by one in 2009, badly reviewed, but a commercial success. Now in 2011 comes the third in the Michael Bay-Spielberg-produced-Shia LaBoeuf series. For the third time Shia LaBeouf is Sam Witwicky, originally a teenager, now an uemployed college graduate, still involved in a war between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, two factions of alien robots who can disguise themselves by transforming into everyday machinery. The Decepticons aim to take over the earth by turning machines into their own army, and Autobots fight that effort, helped by Sam Witwicky and whoever joins up with him, including John Turturro again and this time Frances McDormand as a stuffy CIA operative.

Transformers is a franchise in the true sense of the word: a line of multiple products related by a common theme and appealing to a certain market. In its 26-year history, the franchise has expanded to encompass comic books, animation, video games and films. There is a TV series, a Marvel Comics series (Marvel dominates the summer blockbuster world). There have been various toy lines, each with its own TV shows and movies growing out of the shows. It's a unified fantasy world, unified but multifarious.

All the comic book blockbuster movies, the Supermans and Spider Mans and Iron Mans and Captain Marvels and Green Lanterns, make heavy use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), as do apocalyptic celluloid visions like Roland Emmemrich's Day After Tomorrow and 2012 and Michael Bay's own Armageddon. None of these movies would exist without CGI. And none of them has much serous merit as a film. Why is this?

Probably because CGI, while making movies more and more glorious (if artificial) visually, continually dumbs them down by making the drama it supposedly embellishes increasingly irrelevant. CGI is not a part of a movie's dialogue or plot but at best a riff on them -- even though the best CGI blockbusters still are the ones that are well-written and well-acted. You wouldn't want to call what Shia LaBoeuf does in the Transformers movies "acting." You'd more likely want to call it yelling and talking fast, with a bit of crying; and as he's recently boasted, he "owns" this series. Michael Bay doesn't seem to care much about writing or acting (he also brought us Pearl Harbor). What Bay cares about -- he has his own company to produce them -- is special effects, and lots of them.

What the heck is going on in Transformers: Dark of the Moon? Silly question, for the fans. They know. They can give you every tiny detail of the action. Wikipedia's entry begins: "In 1961, a Cybertronian spacecraft crash lands on the far side of the moon. Known as the Ark, it was the last ship to escape a Cybertron devastated by war. Piloted by Sentinel Prime, it carried 'the Pillars,' technology that could save the Cybertronians once and for all. On Earth, the crash of the Ark is detected by NASA, and President John F. Kennedy authorizes the mission to put a man on the moon as a cover. In 1969, Apollo 11 lands on the surface of the Moon to investigate the Ark. . .In the present day, the Autobots have forged a military alliance with the United States. . . " and so on for 940 words. From the point of view of the non-fan, the movie makes little sense. But if you look closely it makes too much sense. It's absolutely ridiculous, but somebody has worked out every detail. Note that the fanboy's wet dream may not appear so if you listen to him after a viewing, because his job with any iteration of a franchise is to demonstrate his expertise by finding fault with the details.

The Sixties seem to have become fertile ground for blockbuster fantasies lately. X-Men: First Class makes liberal use of JFK footage in its coopting of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The runup to Dark of the Moon's main action draws heavily on simulations and on TV clips of JFK, Nixon, and Walter Cronkite it its sci-fi rewriting of the Apollo 11 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Meanwhile Sam Witwicky is having trouble finding a job after college and is jealous of the close relations between his English babe gf Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) and h her boss (Patrick Dempsey). Sam goes to work for John Malkovitch, a well-dressed nutcase with a pearly gray wig, an object milked for a quick laugh. Dark of the Moon has plenty of humor starting out, though like so many blockbusters of its kind it ends with general mayhem, this time a solemn, protracted battle sequence involving the destruction of downtown Chicago, with Autobots and Decepticons raging while Sam and his pals rush around inside and on top of skyscrapers, one of which bends over in the middle and hangs there, defying gravity. That's funny, but by then the movie has become too hyperkinetic to have time to joke around any more. And, at two hours and a half, too long for all but the fans. But then they are many.

It's hard to overestimate the gorgeousness of the cyber images in Dark of the Moon. Very often they are a glorious chaos, pleasing to the eye of anyone brought up with abstract expressionism, as the robotic creatures, whose changing back and forth from and to automobiles or other ordinary machinery is the least of their prodigies, smash into each other or into buildings or are caught in mid-transformation so that the images become marvels of colorful abstract fragmentation. And it's all very sharp, partly because every image, a night overview of the Chicago urban cityscape, for instance, has undergone heavy computer manipulation of a kind that is skillful and bright. Are these images the plot? Do they augment the plot, or detract from it? But after all, what plot? These gigantic gadgets are arguably more soulless and harder to distinguish from each other than they were in Bay's first two versions. All you know for sure is that they're endlessly warring robotic monsters, with a few humans (not much use here of crowd scenes) running around trying ineffectually to influence things. Sam Witwicky has gotten a medal from President Obama (bringing things up to date). He's foolishly brave. But does he accomplish anything? I lost track. Attempting to make sense out of the "story" here will numb your brain because however detailed it is, it's not dramatized coherently. I wasn't a fan of the low budget South African alien flick District 9, but compared to this, District 9 is Shakespeare. Armond White, who acutely links the swirling CGI battle sequences here with Italian futurist painting, also argues that there has been nothing as good or as richly humanistic about robots and souls since Spielberg's 2001 A.I., and has underlined the sad fact that all the movies Spielberg has produced "stink." You can't talk about Dark of the Moon in the same breath with A.I.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened in the US and the UK Wednesday, June 29, 2011.

[Johann]

Thanks Chris.

Your CGI comments are bang-on.
Christopher Nolan has said that he wants everything in his Batman films to be as real as he can make them without heavy reliance on CGI.
You want the story to have what Richard Donner championed: "Verismilitude".

Transformers is what it is: bombastic action and entertainment. Take it or leave it. I hear every person who says they hate it.
I should hate a series like this. But I love the Transformers films. I never thought I'd ever be in Michael Bay's corner but I am for his Transformers series. The special effects and CGI are overwhelming at times, and it's intentional. On a big-screen/IMAX screen- wowza Mama.
Children should love the hell out of it. If I was a kid I'd be raving to everyone within earshot how great Transformers is.
It's ripe for criticism, and as an adult you can fire away if you need to get it off your chest (speaking to anyone reading).

Just enjoy it for what it is: neo-mythology. Of course it's ridiculous. We need that sometimes.
There is such a thing as therapeutic ridiculousness. I get mine from South Park.

[Chris Knipp]

The thing to realize is that though there's a definite specific plot, Michael Bay is not good at putting that over. He's too focused on the effects. And that is something to watch out for in blockbusters all the time now. Effects and a giant melee take over Abrams' Super 8. It happens more often than not. Some with reason accuse X-Men: First Class of degenerating into a B-picture war movie with its Cuban Missile debacle.

Some other critics have written similar things about the cannibalistic effect of CGI today. I think Denby did apropos of Green Lantern; I'll have to look. I don't know quite what Christopher Nolan is saying there as you cite him and I am suspicious of his declarations. For an example of a visually glorious film that doesn't rely on CGI, see Tarsem Singh's The Fall. CGI is taking over the world of popular American cinema like one of the giant alien animatronic monsters it is so good at creating. However look at the sequences in Transformers 3: the abstract experssionism/Italian Futurism of it all, an orgasmic feast for the eye, signifying nothing (in art I don't require significance: only a dolt looks at a picture and says, "But what does it mean?)

I never even saw the two previous Bay Transformers movies. I might have sat for a few minutes but not watched through. It was hard to stay focused on this one too toward the end. The brain tended to glaze over in the final melee. However there was fun to be had early on and the sheer orgy of creature-morphing conflict toward the end was fascinating even though the story didn't go anywhere and wasn't apparently meant to, the better to make a sequel for.

[Johann]

Points taken.

CGI is relied on way too much these days.
Remember, it "SPEAKS ACTION" in any language, which means that the story takes a backseat.
Nothing is plausible in this film, it's just great fun to see morphing robots.
Thomas Edison would've shit his pants if he saw a Transformers movie!
The movie "magic" of the Transformers would gobsmack Edison or Melies.
It wasn't so long ago that Orson Welles scared the crap out of people with his radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.
I'm sufficiently impressed with the grandeur of the SFX that I forgive the giant plot holes.
(Like I do for Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith).

In a perfect world these Transformers films would appeal more to logic and reality, but hey, as far as summer Blockbusters go, Transformers is exactly what I expect in a BIG summer movie. These are the ones where I would actually enjoy some popcorn and twizzlers and sit back. I know I can switch my brain off and just react to the CGI carnage. Some movies are for your refined intellect & medulla, some are for your inner kid/fanboy!

[Chris Knipp]

CGI is making it impossible to scare the crap out of people any more. When anything can be made to look real nothing looks real and nothing matters. It's just a spectacle. But a beautiful film whose spectacles are achieved naturally without CGI like Tarsem Singh's The Fall is more beautiful, because cyber images don't really look quite real and the authentic thing has a texture the eye can savor. The fact is that even though Transformers is fun, Michael Bay is a bad director. Shia LaBoeuf says he's stepping away from the franchise with T3, but I don't guess Bay will give somebody conceivably better at telling a story a chance to move in. Honestly given the origins of the series in a set of toys, it's unlikely a whole lot better movie could come out of it. Shakespeare sometimes worked from flimsy material. Not in Hollywood though.

"In a perfect world these Transformers films would appeal more to logic and reality, but hey, as far as summer Blockbusters go, Transformers is exactly what I expect in a BIG movie."--Johann.

A perfect world would simply be a better director than Michael Bay. However to equal what he has done he or she would need to be as good with computer-generated images. "As far as summer Blockbusters go" is siding without question with the degenerative developments that began in the Seventies, the whole concept of the summer blockbusters. They originally didn't however require the takeover of the mechanical. Jaws had simple effects. Star Wars was sleep-inducing for some of us (my father) but still had a rich narrative. Grease (1978 ff.) was a human musical. Other summer blockbusters that Transformers needs to be measured against: Airplane, ET, Batman, Jurassic Park, The Mummy, Iron Man, Inception. Do you think Transformers is "as summer Blockbusters go" when compared to these? Probably not, except for The Mummy. I would personally rate X-Men: First Class above it, and the comng Captain Marvel, with its heavy period gloss as evinced in the new fuller trailer, shows a fighting chance of being better too. Thor is relatively thin, but it had much more going on plot-wise. Green Lantern was lame and thin in all areas. Transformers is a summer blockbuster better than Greren Lantern. Not much to shout about there, though.

[Johann]

Thanks for something to chew on.
You're absolutely right that films like Tarsem's THE FALL pull off visuals that give a viewer way more than Michael Bay does/did.
(and probably a lot cheaper). Bay can't be mentioned in the same breath as a Master like Tarsem.
They are two totally different men.

There are summer blockbusters that do their jobs and some that don't.
I actually can't defend Transformers any more than I have.
The holes are so large in the storytelling that the only defence I really have is the scale of the CGI.
I haven't seen this new installment, but the last one (Revenge of the Fallen) was quite a cloudy clusterfuck when it comes to narrative.
I had to close my eyes at all the busy-ness of the CGI at one point too.
I expect the same from this third film.

It is definitely clear that the visual effects trump the script.
You don't go into this movie expecting depth. If you do, you'll be grumpy...

Blockbusters sink or swim. Depends on the Beast.
Sometimes they nail it on the head. (Iron Man/Avatar/The Matrix (the first one)/The Dark Knight/Spiderman)
Sometimes they stink. (Catwoman/Garfield/Steel (w/Shaq)/Last Action Hero/Battlefield Earth)
and
Sometimes you get a movie with a few things going for it but not enough to make it a "hit", even if it rakes in scads and scads of cash...