Oh, Michael Bay, what on earth are we going to do with you? The director’s latest venture, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” reminds me why I use his name metonymically to represent all that is wrong with modern Hollywood filmmaking. I have come to believe that the director’s ambition is to make movies akin to hitting your head against a wall: that is, both should be experiences to kill a massive amount of brain cells.
To call the movie thinly plotted is a vast overstatement; it’s a jumble of events that gives Bay an excuse to blow stuff up. In fact, using the word plot is insulting to the craft of writing. If there was any sort of story to the movie, I couldn’t make it out amidst the deafening noisiness. All I picked up on was some sort of Apollo 11 conspiracy that brings back more villainous Decepticons, thus allowing Bay to unleash the Autobots to fight them for prolonged periods of time while Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky runs around like he just escaped from an insane asylum and the new Megan Fox, Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitley, stands there looking hot while managing to still have a perfectly unscathed face amidst the disaster around her.
It’s hard to believe now that this series used to be good. The first “Transformers,” which came out four years ago, was a fun mix of action, humor, and excitement. Since it did so well at the box office, Bay seems to have assumed it was only because of the action and dialed down every other aspect of the series to make the one non-stop. I don’t mind watching buildings explode or bullets fly, but it gets old when you get pounded by it ceaselessly. For this reason, the first sequel “Revenge of the Fallen” was a total disaster and one of the worst movies released in 2009.
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