FILM REVIEW Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

A series far from its Prime

Release Date: OUT NOW!
12 A / 157 minutes
Distributor: Paramount
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whitely, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, Peter Cullen, Leonard Nimoy, Hugo Weaving

No one expects Dostoyevsky from a Transformers movie, but it takes more than giant alien robots punching each other in the face to make the perfect popcorn blockbuster.

The “story” this time, like X-Men: First Class, is rooted in a neat secret history – the space race wasn’t simply a competition to be first on the lunar surface, but a mission to investigate the crashed spacecraft of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime. Sentinel is the key to a technology which could win the war for either side, no surprise then that the Decepticons have come out of hiding to track him down.

The good news first: Dark Of The Moon corrects the biggest problems with its immediate predecessor. Gone is the plot’s mystical matrix mumbo jumbo in favour of a far more straightforward Decepticon invasion-earth. Gone is the weary globe-hopping and offensively annoying twins (huzzah!). Gone is the incomprehensible camerawork and choreography. In fact the final hour of relentless city-wide Bayhem, where the Decepticons devastate Chicago, is arguably the pinnacle of the “trilogy” and a special effects tour de force as newbie Shockwave tears buildings down with his giant one-eyed mechanical snake (not a euphemism).

If this final set-piece is a finely-tuned thrill-engine, then the opening 90 minutes are flabbier than Jabba the Hutt after a stint at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sam spends half the movie buttoned down by a tedious job search. New girlfriend Rosie Huntington-Whatsherface is totally incapable of halfway convincing dialogue, while the rest of the mammoth cast is a who’s who (literally, “who’s that again?”), of previous players and buffoonish new faces. Only Firefly’s Alan Tudyk comes away clean, providing some of the films biggest laughs.

The final sequence may be worth the price of admission alone, but without the sense of wide-eyed wonder which made the first film, for all its faults, the perfect Transformers movie, Dark Of The Moon is colder than flesh on steel.

Jordan Farley