Latest ‘Transformers' Insults Moviegoers

As an embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern American society and culture, Transformers: Dark of the Moon succeeds spectacularly.

To dismiss it as mindless entertainment is to miss the point entirely. Like Passion of the Christ and The Blind Side, this is the sort of mega-blockbuster that attracts viewers who don’t often attend movies. Its status as a cultural phenomenon should inspire film scholars to investigate precisely why it has connected with such a large section of the American moviegoing public. 

If Transformers is a reflection of its audience, it is a depressing one indeed. There isn’t a shred of substance beneath the picture’s extravagantly expensive surface.

True love is portrayed as nothing more than a pair of collagen-injected lips on an Abercrombie & Fitch model. Wisdom is nothing more than a stilted pep talk delivered by an outdated Hasbro action figure. The plot is just convoluted enough to conceal the fact that it makes absolutely no sense.

The dialogue is so idiotic that it encourages listeners to blot it out, while the nonstop visual effects bend and contort objects beyond the level of comprehension. If this doesn’t sound like a cinematic lobotomy, I don’t know what does.

None of this would be as appalling if the film weren’t so serious. But alas, director Michael Bay views himself as a flag-waving, military-courting patriot with a pro-war agenda to deliver. The film’s Fourth of July weekend release is as much of a non-coincidence as the passel of right-wing winks to the audience: one of which is administered by Fox News’s most marketable shouter, Bill O’Reilly.

Yet it isn’t the political subtext I object to in Transformers. It’s the simple-minded smugness and audience-insulting manipulation that make every frame so brazenly offensive. 

Ever since 1998’s Armageddon, it has been obvious that Bay was never meant to become a feature filmmaker. His skills are built for churning out the sort of U.S. Army propaganda ads that make military service look like a glossy theme park ride. What made Bay’s 2001 epic Pearl Harbor such an outlandish folly was the fact that it went out of its way to make war carnage look cool. As countless soldiers were obliterated by Japanese firepower, Bay’s sensationalistic lens emphasized the action-packed awesomeness of the moment, as opposed to its rather tragic nuances. 

Yet Bay’s original Transformers in 2007 benefited from its inherent lack of consequence. It simply allowed the filmmaker to do what he does best: blow stuff up with all the glee of a 7-year-old playing with his toys. Such a childlike spirit was ideal for a franchise based on the Hasbro toy line and accompanying animated series featuring alien robots that morphed into cars.

Shia LaBeouf (who I still believe could be the John Cusack of his generation) did a fine job as snarky "everyboy" Sam Witwicky, while the photogenic but talentless Megan Fox allowed her body to be objectified as if it were one of the vehicles. The 2007 film was trash, but it was entertaining trash and a box office success, which has grossed $319,246,193 in the U.S.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for its follow-ups: 2009’s abysmal Revenge of the Fallen, and now Dark of the Moon, which inexplicably rips off the name of a Pink Floyd album (I suggest that the fourth installment should be titled, Transformers: A Momentary Lapse of Reason). 

This is a cynical, even hateful exercise in alleged entertainment. The action is instantly numbing, the jokes are crude and obnoxious (not to mention homophobic) and the script is overloaded with preachy monologues about the nobility of waging war for the purposes of “freedom.” Of course, this film is no more about freedom than the War on Terror was, but I digress.

In the history-skewering prologue (which will undoubtedly cause a few Palinites to amend several Wikipedia pages), we learn that the first manned mission to the Moon was launched for devious reasons, as is proven by the words of a badly digitized President John F. Kennedy. It appears that a spacecraft from the Transformers’ planet of Cybertron was discovered on the barren surface, thus inspiring the peaceful Autobots and destructive Decepticons to uncover its mysteries. 

For reasons too witless to divulge, this somehow leads to a great deal of carnage in downtown Chicago, as the hulking, expressionless ’bots duke it out in front of iconic buildings that recently provided the backdrop for an infinitely superior Batman box office smash, The Dark Knight.

Though no explosive image matches the power of Christopher Nolan’s mind-boggling in-camera effects, it must be acknowledged that Bay has noticeably resisted his reliance on fragmented editing this time around, enabling a handful of individual shots to overwhelm the senses with their sheer scope. Unfortunately, this more measured approach allows Bay even more time to ogle the nubile flesh of LaBeouf’s new love interest, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, whose acting is so deplorable that she makes Megan Fox look like Meryl Streep.

The ensemble also includes some real actors, such as John Turturro, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand, who should all be ashamed for taking such a lazy paycheck. 

Laziness is most certainly the name of the game for Bay, who can’t stage an action sequence without recycling the same clichés utilized by his previous films. Viewers have already noted how a key set piece in the climactic battle is copied nearly shot-for-shot from Bay’s 2005 effort, The Island.

Yet that level of ineptitude is nothing compared to this film’s laughably sloppy location work. During the first half of this 157-minute opus, Bay tries to make Chicago and Milwaukee pass for Washington, D.C. resulting in a vision of the nation’s capital that includes the Windy City skyline, Lake Michigan and the iconic Milwaukee Art Museum. There’s also a chase scene along the highways of D.C. that includes multiple close-ups of a sign displaying the name of a nearby town. The town is Aurora. Clearly Bay (and his fans) don’t care about the little details.

It’s only appropriate that the Transformers films are routinely released during the same weekend as firework displays. Bay’s films are a lot like fireworks: They are loud, colorful, pollute the environment and create a smokescreen that blinds patriotic eyes to their surrounding reality. In searching for the right words to describe Transformers: Dark of the Moon, my mind can’t help but recall the eloquent words once uttered by the Wizard of Oz: “a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk.”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened June 29 at the AMC Showplace Village Crossing 18, Regal Gardens 1-6 and Regal Gardens 7-13 in Skokie. The PG-13 movie broke all Fourth of July holiday weekend records, taking in an estimated $97.4 million that brought its domestic total to $162 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

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