TRANFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

Time wasting is an art that I have cultivated for a long time. It guided me, at some point, to watch Transformers, the 2007 movie. I remember that is was a box office success, and that many critics were surprised that they actually liked it. Indeed, it was not such a bad movie. With such terrible premise (giant robots that come to Earth and desguise themselves as cars, trucks and planes) and background (plastic toys that became a rudimentary animation series and a comic strip), it turn out to be fun, as far as your frontal lobe was basking in the sun somewhere else.

Once I forgave the premise, I mildly enjoy the action, the touches of humour, Megan Fox... but could not get over a couple of things. The first one may not be important for this kind of movie: besides Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, I could not recognise the robots. The fact that they were essentially big grey piles of metal changing shapes and moving around a lot did not help at all. But, as I said, that may not have been important. For the conosseurs, that must have not been a problem; probably they could recognise each robot by almost invisible features. For other people, lost in the action and the music, knowing that the good robots had blue eyes and the bad ones had red eyes was likely enough.

The second thing was, at least for me, more difficult to accept. The thing is, Michael Bay is, at best, a mediocre director, and usually he is a bad one. Everything in the movie followed a by-the numbers structure that seemed assembled, well, in a plastic-toy factory. You see, at the beginning there si some suspense and anticipation. Then things are revealed. The music soars when it has to soar. There is an underdog (portraid with a certain natural charisma by Shia LaBeouf) and a girl that is absurdly sexy. The complications are predictable and, well, simple. The comic relief is delivered in the precise moment it should be delivered. In other words, there is nothing original, surprising, human about the movie. We are supposed to care about the couple, but Megan Fox is a mannequin (and acts like one) without any depth, and LaBeouff, in spite of his intensity, is just a collection of mannerisms. We are supposed to care about humankind, but we see very little of it. We are supposed to care about the good robots and we can barely distinguish them. It is like caring about talking fridges.

Then, the second movie, Revenge of the fallen, came. It was a mess. Everybody, including LaBeouff and Bay, critisised it (shameless, those two). Why, because on top of all the faults of the first movie, the plot was very convoluted and confusing. There were more, and bigger, robots; more people and more action, the music was louder, the jokes more frequent. But those were only distractions, so you would not notice how simple and stupid everything was.

So, the third movie is, in a way, a return to the roots: a more straightforward plot with clearer good and bad guys. Critics and public seem to think so: although in Rotten Tomatoes and the IMDB the ratings are lower than the first movie’s, they are definetely higher than the second’s. Indeed, the movie is a bit like the first, with the same strengths (is there a noun for a quality that is not particularly strong?) and the same weaknesses, but given the fact that the movie lasts not a lot less than three hours, there had to be more excesses. LeBeouff returns, of course, in his mumbling intense verborreic mode. Megan Fox is gone, replaced by more of the same, a model that barely acts, but moves around in short dresses and protrudes her lips in a way that even Angelina Jolie would found shameful. More robots, more damage, louder music, more characters... Actually, the movie includes a few more improbabilites as excuses to bring back familiar faces, like John Turturro’s and Tyrese Gibson, and then populates the screen with the likes of Francis McDormand, John Malkovich, Patrick Dempsey and Alan Tudyk, in some cases only to have more mouths to attach jokes to. Obviously, character development or psychological depth are utterly absent.

The producers even manage to include a kind of agressive product placement: not only the good guys transform mostly into GM products, but the bad guys seem to have a predilection for Mercedes. In the end, this only shows that the movie seems to have one goal: sell as much as it can. And, perhaps, prepare the field for the next installment.