Transformers: Dark of the Moon Review: A Great Premise Buried Under Rubble

Michael Bay’s third Transformers film opens with a lie about the Space Race, and for about an hour that lie is the best thing in it. Transformers: Dark of the Moon arrives in 2011 as the sequel to Revenge of the Fallen and the third installment in the series built on Hasbro’s toy line. Bay directs again. Ehren Kruger writes again. Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky, and the film runs 154 minutes, which is a long time to spend on a premise this good.

The premise: the Ark, a spacecraft carrying an invention that could end the war between Autobots and Decepticons, crashes on the far side of Earth’s Moon in 1962. NASA detects the wreck. President John F. Kennedy authorizes a lunar mission as cover for investigating it. In 1969, the Apollo 11 crew lands, secretly inspects the Ark, and comes home. The tagline is “Be afraid of the dark.” The film should have taken its own advice.

Trailer, via Amblin Entertainment.

Apollo 11 and the Fuel Cell at Chernobyl

In the present day, three years after the battle of Egypt, the Autobots continue to work for NEST, no longer in secret. A mission to the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster turns up suspected alien technology. Shockwave, a Decepticon scientist, attacks with his giant worm, the Driller. Both escape. Optimus Prime finds the technology is a fuel cell from the Ark.

That discovery sends the Autobots to the Moon, where they find Sentinel Prime, the leader who came before Optimus, comatose alongside five Pillars he built to establish a “Space Bridge” — a wormhole that teleports matter between two points. Optimus revives Sentinel using the energy of the Matrix of Leadership. Leonard Nimoy voices Sentinel. It is a fine piece of casting and the film does not know what to do with it.

Sam Witwicky’s New Job and Laserbeak

Sam now lives with his new girlfriend, Carly Spencer, played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and cannot get work with the Autobots. At his new job, a co-worker named Jerry Wang hands him information about the Ark, then is assassinated by the Decepticon Laserbeak. Sam pulls in Seymour Simmons, John Turturro’s returning conspiracy man, to look into the Decepticon murders of people tied to the American and Soviet lunar programs.

They find two surviving cosmonauts, who produce photos of hundreds of Pillars on the Moon. The conclusion lands hard: the Decepticons raided the Ark long before Apollo 11 and left Sentinel and the five Pillars behind for the Autobots to find. The film has a real idea here — that the space program was a stage set for a war we were losing — and then it spends its back half burying that idea under rubble.

A Cast of Loud Men and One Loud Boss

The supporting cast is stacked and mostly stranded. Frances McDormand plays Mearing. Patrick Dempsey plays Dylan. John Malkovich plays Bruce Brazos, Sam’s boss, and he is the only person on screen having fun. Malkovich described Brazos as a loudmouth businessman, a jerk and a fun character, and said the work was very, very enjoyable.

Hugo Weaving voices Megatron. Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson return as Lennox and Epps. The film’s off-screen story is messier than its plot. Megan Fox was originally attached, and Dempsey’s Dylan Gould was written as the employer of her character, Mikaela Banes. Published accounts say her absence followed executive producer Steven Spielberg choosing not to renew her role after she compared Bay and his work ethic to Adolf Hitler; her representatives said leaving the franchise was her decision. Bay later claimed Spielberg told him to fire her, a claim Spielberg denied. Huntington-Whiteley was cast as Sam’s new girlfriend.

3D Cameras, Six Cities, and a Moved Date

Development on a third film began in May 2007. The production used regular 35 mm cameras alongside specially developed 3D cameras, and shot in Chicago, Florida, Indiana, Milwaukee, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. The visual effects required more complex robots than the previous films, which took longer to render. Paramount moved the release from July 1 to June 29 to gauge an early response to footage. Early screenings ran June 28, 2011, one night before the worldwide release.

The film grossed $1.124 billion worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film in history at the time and the second highest-grossing film of 2011. Reviews were mixed. Metacritic lists the film at 42/100.

Here is what the money does not settle. Dark of the Moon has the strongest opening act of the three Bay Transformers films and the weakest sense of what to do with it. The Chernobyl sequence, the Moon reveal, the cosmonaut photographs — these are clean, patient, genuinely eerie pieces of storytelling, and they belong to a better movie. Then the film reverts to what it always reverts to: noise at volume, robots without weight, a camera that will not hold still long enough to let a shot land.

The 154-minute runtime is the tell. A movie with this premise needs ninety minutes and a hard cut. Dark of the Moon keeps adding — more robots, more cities, more Pillars, more men shouting into radios — as if volume were the same thing as scale. It is not. The Moon is scale. A wormhole is scale. A hundred Decepticons falling through Chicago is just arithmetic.

This paper’s verdict: the premise is the strongest of the three films and the execution does not hold it. Dark of the Moon is a franchise selling spectacle, and the parts that still work are the quiet ones — a wreck on the far side of the Moon, a photograph in a cosmonaut’s hand, a lie told to a country for sixty years.

Dark of the Moon · Michael Bay · movie review · sci-fi · Shia LaBeouf · Transformers