Movie Review #1 Transformer: Dark of the Moon (2011)

– This ain't no original movie!

Here we go again, another installment of Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. With the three movies having an income of well over 2 billion USD, some would say it's hard to argue the movies got it wrong. However I'm here to do just that.

I don't even know how it made that much money with the three movies. From the first movie Transformers to the end of Dark of the Moon, I was disappointed scene by scene. This review is just for DotM though, so let's get started.

The movie is 154 minutes long. I'm going on the record as a fan of action movies, that if your movie is going well over 2 hours and it's supposed to be a fun action movie, you are doing it wrong. By the end of the movie, all the explosions are dull. You've desensitized your audience and that's the thing with Michael Bay, He LOVES explosions; bloody well loves them as much as he does making them pointless. Which brings me right to the next problem of this movie: crude jokes and gratuitous camera shots. There are quite a few examples throughout, but the two sequences that are the worst are 1) when the mother Judy Witwicky (Julie White) talks to her son about how well-endowed he must be and 2) the entire introduction to Carly Spencer pants-less (played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) and as far as first impressions go, this is a rather tacky one; a sure sign of what Huntington-Whiteley has to hope for in her short movie career.

Next, the shaky cam does nothing for combat and action scenes; never will. If you're cutting costs, cut the entire scene, I'd rather have less action in general if you're going to bastardize a fight of epic proportions (see any fight Optimus Prime is in). Speaking of costs, they can certainly cut down the expenses by cutting out a lot of useless actors. I have a rather lengthy suggestion as to how to fix this, but the short version is to take out a majority of the “in the life of” segments with the Witwicky family. These scenes are just painful to watch with some of the worst acting in the movie.

Finally, my largest problem with this movie and franchise is that it is clearly about humans who just happen to live in a world in which Transformers exist. However, just go watch any other Transformers media and you'll notice that is it actually about a war between two warring factions of the Transformers and sometimes it contains a few privileged people who know of their existence. Too many humans have far too much screen time and development while Transformers enter, fight and die all without the audience knowing who they were or where they even came from.

      On the left a proverbial mess, the right a childhood hero.

I saw the first movie because I wanted to relive my childhood. I'm sure many of you saw the original movie like I did as a child on the big screen. That movie was perfect and it still is. This series that started in 2007 has so very little in common with the original Transformers, that I'm just not sure who their target audience was. The only thing they keep in common is the name Witwicky, some Transformers names and transformations and that's about it. They didn't keep the heart and soul of the story at all and, in general, I'd be disappointed to bring my kid to this movie.

I gave this a 2/10, just as I gave the first two in the Michael Bay series, because each one has exactly the same problems.


PS: Thanks Mom & Dad who let me see The Transformers (1986) movie when I was a child. I can't remember if it was in theatre or home video, but back then and even now the movie fills me with such wonderment that it doesn't really matter.