People seem to really enjoy bashing Michael Bay. His movies make boatloads of cash at the box office, yet every review I read treats him like he's the Antichrist. They hate the movies he directs, they hate the movies he produces, and they hate him for his involvement with Platinum Dunes, the production house that specializes in remaking classic '70s and '80s horror movies. But I can't say I have the same amount of vitriol towards Bay that others do. I'm cool with Platinum Dunes, and I can't rage against his directorial efforts, since I've only seen three of them, those three being his Transformers trilogy.
People have been especially savage when critiquing the Transformers movies. While it was justified in the case of Revenge of the Fallen, I don't think the other two deserve it. In particular, I thought the newly-released Dark of the Moon deserved a lot better. It's got more than a few flaws, I'll admit, but it's not as bad a movie as the critics would have you think.
As the movie begins, the Autobots are still allied with the United States military, yet largely acting independently in eliminating threats to humanity's existence. After a mission in Ukraine, Optimus Prime (the voice of Peter Cullen) discovers in the Chernobyl facility's rubble a Cybertronian artifact that had the Soviet Union had attempted to harness as a power source. Their attempt was obviously a failure, since the Chernobyl disaster happened and all.
It turns out that this artifact is a fuel cell from the Ark, an Autobot spaceship that had escaped from Cybertron at the end of the planet's civil war. Piloted by Sentinel Prime (the voice of Leonard Nimoy), the Ark carried "the Pillars," technology that could have ended the war and saved Cybertron. The Ark crashed on the moon in 1961, where it was detected by NASA and ended up sparking the space race between America and the Soviet Union. While history records that America and Apollo 11 won that race and got to the moon first, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's exploration of the Ark has been top secret ever since. Not even the Autobots were told the Ark was there until finding that fuel cell.
Upset by the fact that the Ark had been kept hidden from him, Optimus Prime embarks on a mission to the moon so he can retrieve Sentinel Prime and the five Pillars that remain on board, describing them as being able to create a bridge between two points in space for transportation. This absolutely terrifies the bureaucratic National Intelligence Director (Francis McDormand), who distrusts all Transformers and thinks the Pillars could be used to summon an invading army.
Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is fresh out of college, living in Washington DC with his new girlfriend Carly Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). And despite having received a medal from President Obama for twice helping save the world, Sam is having a hard time finding employment. He ends up landing a job as a mail room clerk, where a co-worker (Ken Jeong) takes a bizarre interest in him. It turns out that the co-worker knows about Sam's secret role in the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, passing along information about something on the dark side of the moon before he is killed by a Decepticon.
Sam passes along the information to Seymour Simmons (John Turturro); the duo start putting together clues and realize that the Decepticons are killing various people connected to the American and Russian space programs. Through their investigations, Sam and Simmons discover that there were actually more Pillars aboard the Ark that what the Autobots found, that the whole thing was a trap set up by the Decepticons... and Sentinel Prime is at the center of this trap.
If you read my review, you'll know that the last Transformers movie left a very bad taste in my mouth. But Dark of the Moon definitely makes up for it. It's not quite up to the level of the first movie, but it's definitely leaps and bounds ahead of Revenge of the Fallen. Dark of the Moon is a fun flick, having excised a lot of the flotsam that plagued that crappy sequel that came before it. Watch Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon back to back, and it's like you've seen two completely different attempts at approaching the Transformers franchise. And the approach taken with Dark of the Moon is probably the approach that should have been taken in the first place.
The movie's only true drawback is that it's too damn long. It's over two and a half hours long, despite only having enough story for an hour and 45 minutes. Roughly the last hour of the movie is all one long fight scene, feeling like so much padding to bloat the movie's running time. It's overbearing, to say the least. There's a ton of stuff that could have been cut out of the last hour, and it wouldn't have made the movie any better or worse.
But leave it to Michael Bay to make an action movie that comes dangerously close to wearing out its welcome. Believe it or not, though, he actually shows some restraint here. It's shocking, I know, but Bay actually holds back a little from his usual "jittery camerawork and super-fast editing" style. You can still definitely tell that it's his kind of movie, but it's not as frenetic as you'd expect. I suspect that it may be in part due to the movie's 3D aspect, since you'd want to linger on things in order for the 3D effects to actually work. But you know what? I liked Bay's approach. It's makes things a hell of a lot more bearable to watch. Yeah, it's 90% action and metal clanging and things blowing up, but it's a fun ride.
And I thought the 3D was phenomenal, to boot. Bay chose to forgo doing a 2D-to-3D conversion in post-production, apparently hiring the crew that helped James Cameron make Avatar to shoot the movie natively in 3D. And the fact that it wasn't some crummy conversion is immediately apparent, as the effects look really, really good. I've always preferred the cheesy "throw stuff at the audience" 3D over the Avatar-style atmospheric 3D as a matter of personal preference, but Dark of the Moon finds a nice balance between both styles.
I did, however, find the script written by Ehren Kruger to be a little weak, though it was mostly due the amount of padding in the last hour. Like I said, any sort of plot or story ends after about 90 to 100 minutes so Bay can stage his huge Transformer war. But it's actually pretty solid, for the most part. I'm not calling it good, but it holds up for the most part. The story doesn't come off as frustratingly convoluted as it was in the first two movies, and the characters are also written stronger. I'm also very happy that Kruger eliminated those annoying twin Autobots from Revenge of the Fallen and reduced Sam's parents down to two or three scenes. That alone already makes Dark of the Moon at least moderately successful.
And last but not least is the acting, which I thought was give or take. I liked Shia LaBeouf, though I got the impression that he's getting kinda burned out on all these Transformers movies. But I will confess that I feel he's got a certain charisma that makes him an amusing watch even in his less-than-stellar moments. And unfortunately, I didn't particularly care for Patrick Dempsey. Dempsey's character, a romantic rival for Sam, is kinda lame, and I thought it affected his performance. I was also unimpressed Francis McDormand and Ken Jeong's performances and I thought John Malkovich was absolutely wasted in his small, utterly pointless cameo.
But there are other performances that I enjoyed a lot. One was John Turturro, who I'll confess to liking in pretty much every movie I see him in. He's really entertaining, really funny, and he's amusing in pretty much all of his scenes. And I also thought Peter Cullen and Leonard Nimoy were fantastic as Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime. I can't go too in depth about Nimoy's performance without spoiling some of the plot, but I will say that his voice work is perfect for what the role requires. I can say the same for Cullen, but the weird thing about it is that Optimus has become a lot more violent in his fight scenes. He's almost sociopathic. But Cullen still brings a lot of intensity to the role and I enjoyed him a lot.
And this brings us to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria's Secret model making her acting debut. Hired as a replacement for Megan Fox (who was fired by Steven Spielberg, the trilogy's executive producer, after she likened Bay to Adolf Hitler), Huntington-Whiteley was brought on solely for her looks. If you don't believe me, then her first appearance in the movie should be proof. The first time we see her in the movie, the camera is pointing right at her butt as she walks around in just her underwear. Yeah.
But Huntington-Whiteley isn't all that bad. She's roughly equal to Fox in terms of acting talent, which means she's still a pretty awful actress all around. But she at least puts forth more effort than Fox ever has. There's a scene where she needles Megatron into picking a fight with Sentinel Prime, and she's actually pretty good in the scene. The only bad part about the whole thing is that Huntington-Whiteley's character isn't an action girl like Fox's was. Fox's character was more than willing to jump into a fight, as evidenced in the first movie when she steals a tow truck and helps Bumblebee get back into the climactic fight scene. But Huntington-Whiteley's character actually tells Sam not to try saving Bumblebee lest he be killed too. Yeah, it means that her character cares for Sam, but this is an action movie. If she'd actually told Sam to go save him and got involved to boot, I think it would have made the character (and Huntington-Whiteley's performance) more likable. But still, for a model with absolutely zero acting experience, she shows at least a little promise, which is more than I can say for Fox.
I know this review puts me in the minority, but I enjoyed Dark of the Moon. It's dumb, mindless entertainment, but that's not always a bad thing. I enjoy a little dumb fun once in a while. And even though it's too damn long, the movie was an entertaining ride from start to finish. Screw the negative reviews, I enjoyed Dark of the Moon. I'd have probably liked it more had Bay used "The Touch" by Stan Bush on the soundtrack. The fact that somebody's made three Transformers movies without it is a damn shame.
Final Rating: **½
No comments:
Post a Comment