When the middle installment in your trilogy contains a scene that involves a giant humanoid robot effectively anally raping a cement mixer in front of the pyramids, the only way from there is up.
And yea, so it is that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is miles better than Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, but still falls miles short of the daft charm that made Transformers such fun.
In fact, fun doesn't feature much at all in Dark Of The Moon: Bay had promised that the second sequel would be "darker ... more emotional", and for the most part he's succeeded. If, that is, you are prepared to believe - as I do - that giant robots can inspire an emotional response, because the humans give you jack shit.
A few months clear of college, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) has a hot new girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), and a lot of time on his hands: he can't get a job to save himself, no matter how many times he mentions that "POTUS" gave him a medal.
We learn this after a handy prologue that explains how Earth ended up in the pickle that won Witwicky his medals. To wit, how the Autobots and Decepticons' war came to Earth via... the Moon! Yes, it turns out an Autobot spacecraft crashed into the dark side of the Moon back in 1961, and the ensuing space race between the USA and USSR was not so much to make giant leaps for mankind, but to recon alien technology.
Since then - and since we last left Optimus Prime and his friends - the Autobots have been working with the US military, popping off around the world to dish out justice to an assortment of central casting villains of nondescript non-Caucasian appearance.
It's on one of these trips - to Chernobyl, which with its abandoned classic cars and, er, merry-go-round, looks an awful lot like a Dwight Yoakam video clip from 1997 - that Lt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his crew are ambushed by a Decepticon driving an enormous mechanical hydra (Shockwave and his Driller).
Meanwhile, people with intel about NASA's Space Race-era involvement with the Autobots are being picked off one-by-one by a Decepticon assassin (Laserbeak).
The extended US military/Autobot crew puts two and two together to make five, and a sulking Optimus throws a bitch fit back at the base to convince the Secretary of Defense (Frances McDormand) to allow them to retrieve the crashed spaceship's pilot - Sentinel Prime - from the Moon to avoid certain Decepticon victory.
Megatron, exiled in generic Africa, gets wind of all this and springs into action, too.
All of this and the film is not even a third of the way through (it's overstuffed at 154-minutes). Suffice to say there is later a plan afoot to reboot Cybertron and downtown Chicago isn't going to like it.
Revenge screenwriter Ehren Kruger has again drawn on Transformers lore for this iteration, at Bay's command, though there's so much mangling and editing of said lore - Laserbeak is now a computer, Soundwave returns from Revenge and still shows no sign of turning into a cassette deck; once again Starscream, one of pop culture's best villains, is relegated to the background - you wonder why he bothered.
(Comic relief this time comes from Brains and Wheelie, two small and non-descript Autobots - one looks like Johnny-5, the other like a pile of Meccano with a sea anemone on top - who live on Witwicky's balcony. Mercifully, unlike Revenge's Skids and Mudflap, they are occasionally actually funny.)
Dark Of The Moon's politics are, for a "USA! USA!" stylist such as Bay, rather perplexing: it's pro-troops, yet curiously anti-Army/government. Considering the immense marketing juggernaut the franchise has become, the film's distrust of corporate America is odd, too. It's almost - almost - refreshing.
The film's gender politics are another thing altogether; at various points throughout the movie it's difficult to believe that Kruger or Bay have ever felt the touch of a human female.
Huntington-Whiteley - giving it a red hot go despite dialogue a three-phrase Barbie would have rejected as "a bit beneath me" - is regularly subjected to lascivious top-to-toe pans, while at the other end of the spectrum, McDormand's cocked-eyebrow response to the question "You are a woman, aren't you?" made me think of Tootsie's Dorothy Michaels' tirade about proving "some idiotic point about how power turns women masculine ... you macho shit-head!"
There's a carelessness to the female characters' dialogue that is striking - when McDormand tells an aide to pass her the "Hermes Birkin, ostrich skin" and she's handed a Hermes Kelly bag, I winced; it's hard to imagine a similar technical mistake being made about a piece of artillery or a classic car model, but oh well, it's just girls' stuff, amirite?!
Regardless of gender, humans get a bum deal here. (Malkovich and McDormand in particular are Slumming It, Inc.) On the robot front, however, Dark Of The Moon is extremely strong.
The twists in the robot action carry far more weight than the human plots; when a favourite Autobot is coldly dispatched by a traitor, his death is genuinely affecting, while you could drop a 10-tonne ACME weight on most of the humans and barely raise a shrug. Similarly, Witwicky's interactions with the trusty Bumblebee are far more moving than his romance with Carly.
Designwise, the production team has outdone itself: the exiled Megatron has refashioned himself as a Mad Max-style Mack Titan, while the Autobots' Wreckers are NASCAR Chevy Impala stock cars tricked out with machine guns; Sentinel Prime takes on the form of a Rosenbauer Panther Airport crash tender fire truck.
As a special effects and sound design spectacle, Dark Of The Moon is utterly unmatched. The intricacy of the effects shots is remarkable, and there isn't a dud among them. A sequence in which Shockwave's Driller slowly strangles an office tower, mirrored glass spraying everywhere, is mouth-agape stuff. The 3D is used judiciously for atmospheric purposes.
It comes down to this: the look of the movie is worth five stars, but when you stir in a one-star script, you end up somewhere in the middle.
The Decepticons regularly refer to humans as "insects", and by halfway through the film I found myself wishing Megatron & Co would just DDT all the homo sapiens to high heaven and leave us with 100% robots. Their thousands of years of infighting and heroism is far more entertaining than another bunch of hooah troops and witless suits.
It might be hard for those who've come recently to the franchise to understand, but Transformers lore is actually rich with Shakespearean levels of intrigue. Dark Of The Moon's effects indicate Bay's team would not struggle to create a robot-only epic, so why don't they?
If there's a fourth installment of Transformers, we can but hope Bay gives up on humans forever. It may just be Transformers' key to brilliance.
- three stars
Source: The Age
No comments:
Post a Comment