Geekscape Reviews: Transformers DotM A Fan’s Review

Dear Michael Bay,

Apology accepted.

While I had my issues with Bay’s first Transformers movie adaptation, I thought it was an OK film. In the end, I was just happy to see my all time favorite heroes from my child-hood on the big screen and back at the forefront of toy sales. The sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, on the other hand was like a backhand to the face. Partially hindered by the 2007-2008 writer’s strike, RotF was a bad movie all around and threatened to destroy the rejuvenated franchise. When Dark of the Moon was announced, I did not have high hopes and neither did most of my friends but as more info leaked about the movie, I could not help but get excited to see it. Lucky for the children of the 80’s, Bay delivered.

There was a lot of pressure on this movie to be good; Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay both came out and said RotF was a bad movie and that they would do better with the next one. Megan Fox was released after (depending on who you believe) comments she made about Bay and her antics on the set. When Ain’t It Cool News posted that the horribly racist pair from RotF, Skids and Mudflap, were scene in the DotM, Bay went so far as to offer a $10,000 reward for proof. Bay was putting his best foot forward in an attempt to salvage his Transformers trilogy.

The movie is doing wonderful in the box office, $162 million in US returns alone, and almost all of my friends agree it is an awesome movie. But there are those who are panning it; lumping it in with the atrocious RotF. Everyone is inclined to his or her opinion and as long as you can back it up with something deeper than “it’s gay” or “that sucked” I can still respect you. That is as long as your expectations are in check but about that later.

So why should you care about my opinion of this movie? Because unlike most of the professional critics who saw this as just another film, sorry, movie because nothing Michael Bay could ever do could be considered a film, I am a die-hard fan of Transformers. When they broke onto the scene in the US in 1984, my brother, my friends and I were instantly hooked. To this day I still have most of my original toys in a large container in my attic. In my office or “man cave” as most people commonly refer to it, the walls are lined with shelves holding sealed boxes from the Hasbro re-issue figures. My two small shelves behind me have the resent Universe and Generations lines; waiting to be played with by my children one day. I also have several of the Masterpiece Transformers to include importing Megatron, who could never be sold here again because of his alternate gun mode. My computer is named Teletran-1; I have two, large Decepticon emblems on the side of my dark blue 2011 Mustang named Thundercracker, my name on Twitter, Facebook, Xbox Live, everything is Optimusgene! Hell I still tear up when Optimus Prime dies in the 1986 animated movie, which I own, as well as the entire Generation series cartoons on DVD.

A small sample of my collection.

The point is I was invested in this movie and this series. While many people may have felt bad after RotF I was down right hurt; the same way many people I’m sure felt after watching G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra if they had played with the toys as a kid and maybe even influenced their decision to join one of the branches of the military. This was not just another movie series to me.

Dark of the Moon takes place several years after Revenge of the Fallen. After defeating the Decepticons, the Autobots are now working with NEST to help with human issues like political squabbles and skirmishes. During an investigation at Chernobyl, they discover part of an Autobot spacecraft. Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) is infuriated and demands to know why the information was held back from the Autobots from Secretary of Defense Mearing (Frances McDonmand).

The spacecraft known as the Ark crash-landed on the dark side of the moon in 1961. The US and Russia were in a race to get to the moon first and explore the wreckage. The Autobots travel to the moon and recover Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy) the former leader of the Autobots and five pillars that are part of a spacebridge that can transport anything from one side of the galaxy to another.

In the mean time Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is living with his new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) in her posh Washington D.C. apartment. Sam has graduated college but cannot seem to get a job; even though he helped the Autobots save the planet twice but is not allowed to talk about it. The pressure mounts as he becomes extremely suspicious of Carly’s wealthy boss Dylan (Patrick Dempsey) who seems to have ulterior motives and his parents; Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White) come to visit. Add to the fact he is stuck with two small, eccentric Autobots named Wheelie (Tom Kenny) and Brains (Reno Wilson) while Bumblebee is off saving the world.

In order to share my thoughts on why I loved the movie, I will unfortunately have to spoil parts of the movie. In fact some of the major plot points are why I enjoyed it so much. So with that…

Warning: Spoiler Alert! If you do not wish to have major plot points spoiled in this movie, please skip down to the rest of the review.

In RotF, we got some loose, mangled BS story about the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, the Primes and then had some spiritual after-life moment with Sam. They received 1 point for bringing in the Matrix and lost 1,000 points for its use. But this time, someone did his or her homework. There are three major ideas or themes from the original cartoon series and the Dreamwave comic they incorporated into this movie that I loved.

The first is the reason why the Decepticons are at it again. In the first movie, they came to Earth in search of “The Cube” that could be used to rebuild their planet. In RotF, the Fallen wants revenge and plans to destroy the sun. Even as a cartoon that would have still been stupid. I have said all along why don’t they just use the original premise from the cartoons; they are here for our resources to rebuild their dead planet. Makes sense right? Well someone was listening, at least mostly.

The Decepticons plan to use humans to rebuild Cybertron. Makes some sense I guess. Six billion easily controlled cheap laborers would make it a bit less difficult to rebuild a civilization. OK so it’s not quite harnessing our oil, natural gas, solar and wind power but it’s close and I’ll take it. In retrospect, it kind of retcon’s the whole Transformer movie, which I don’t think anyone really has an issue with.

The second item of nostalgic goodness comes from the spacebridge. Originally introduced to the Transformers universe in season one of the cartoon series, the spacebridge allowed the Autobots and Decepticons to travel from Earth to Cybertron. In the three part series, The Ultimate Doom, the Decepticons use human workers (sound familiar) and build a giant spacebridge to transport the entire planet of Cybertron to Earth. And what happens in DotM? Plus 1,000 points.

Finally, in an attempt to make sure the Autobots don’t ruin their plan, the Decepticons threaten the humans with extinction if they don’t force the Autobots to leave earth. So they pile them into a modified space shuttle and send them into space. But before the shuttle gets too far it is destroyed and the Autobots are presumed dead. This has actually been done twice already in Transformers lore. The first was in the second season of the carton series; Megatron works with a human to convince the public the Autobots are evil and they are forced to leave in a shuttle and eventually die when their shuttle flies into the sun. It was also done in the Dreamwave comics in 2002; after the Autobots defeat the Decepticons, they load up in a shuttle and head for Cybertron promising to return with new technology. But the shuttle is destroyed just out of earth’s atmosphere and the Transformers are thought to be dead.

No matter how you slice it someone did some research before going ahead with this movie. Are these new and innovative story ideas? No, but the fact all three appear in the Transformers history and now show up in the new movie is pretty solid evidence. For anyone who might think the storyline is flimsy or didn’t make sense; number one it’s based on a children’s cartoon, give it a break and number two now you must feel like “average” people do when they watched The Lord of the Rings or any comic book movie and did not get all of the references.

End spoilers.

As for the rest of the movie it was a visual assault, which is exactly what you should expect from a summer blockbuster. The explosions are loud, the sound design makes it feel like you are experiencing raw metal on metal fighting and even though it wasn’t used enough for my taste, the classic transforming sound makes a return. You know what sound I’m talking about, the one from the cartoon you and your friends used to make when you were playing with the toys.

I saw the movie in 3D and while it did not suffer from the murkiness that so many other live-action 3D movies do, the 3D just didn’t really bring anything special to the movie. Perhaps it’s just me, but after about 45 minutes of watching 3D it looses it’s effect on me and I stop noticing things popping out of the screen. I think I have decided I will reserve 3D movie watching for animated movies, where it truly pops and takes advantage of the medium, like How to Train Your Dragon did.

As for the rest of the visuals it was a little of a mixed bag. The first movie suffered from a problem where it was difficult to tell the robots apart when they were fighting. RotF cleared that up and I’m happy to say DotM also does a good job of making each robot easy to pick out. On the other hand there were a few effects that just seemed a little off. Watching the pillars float up around the world just had this cheesy, unreal look to them. The other time I was drawn out of the movie is a scene where Sam is riding in Bumblebee. There is an explosion or something, Bumblebee flies into the air, transforms with Sam flying in space then transforms back into a car around him. Perhaps my brain just couldn’t handle the idea of this or the 3D was a little off but it just didn’t look right. I might have blamed it on the 3D but since the giant robots look completely believable the rest of the time when standing next to the humans I don’t think so.

Then there are the performances. To their credit, Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel and John Turturro all stay true to their original characters and perform as expected. Watching John Malkovich was a pleasure as always but the real question was about Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and how she would perform. Considering she was hired to fill the role of “hot piece of ass” that Megan Fox vacated and the fact she is not an actress and just a Victoria’s Secret model, I didn’t have high hopes. Hell she doesn’t even have a line in any of the trailers. In the end she was OK. Not good, but certainly not as bad as I had feared. It does beg the question as to why a hot actress wasn’t hired for the role instead? I’m sure if you asked any red-blooded American male he could ramble off a long list of attractive actresses that could have filled the role.

Like I mentioned before, Bay was adamant about correcting the errors that were made in RotF, which meant cutting back on the sexuality and lowbrow humor. For the most part he succeeded. Our first shot of Carly is a slow pan up of her ass in panties as she walks towards the bed with Sam and there is a scene later on where the camera pans around her in a slick, white dress as Patrick Dempsey compares the lines of a car to a woman but at least we weren’t subjected to a female Decepticon trying to seduce Sam and getting the money shot of Devestator’s balls.

Of all of the things this movie did right, the main one would have to be the fact it did not seem like it was focused on the humans. Sure, the humans still eat up the majority of the time on screen but as soon as the shit starts to hit the fan the entire side story BS falls away. You really start to feel a connection with the robots and in fact, my wife found herself shouting out loud several times during the movie in response to the fate of the Autobots and Decepticons. Needless to say, I could not have loved her more at that time.

In the end, like all movies, whether you like Transformers: Dark of the Moon is going to depend on your expectations. As long as you know what to expect, you will enjoy the movie. It’s based on a cartoon and toy series from the 80’s where giant robots from outer space come to Earth and turn into vehicles and electronics for crying out loud. If you are expecting an artfully crafted film that will one day grace the stage on Oscar night, go elsewhere. But if you want a fun, over-the-top, action and special effects packed summer block-buster, Transformers fits the bill. To put it another way, if you didn’t like Green Lantern because you were expecting The Dark Knight, then you won’t enjoy this movie either. Oh and by the way, for those who question why Michael Bay is still allowed to make movies keep this in mind; Christopher Nolan has said he enjoys Michael Bay movies because Bay knows how to do what he does better than anyone else.

As always, I invite you to watch the movie yourself before forming any opinions. If you have seen the movie, please leave your comments in the section below. While I hope this is the final Transformers movie (at least for a long while) I would not be opposed to seeing another if it were held to this standard. Oh and to everyone who cried fowl because of the famous Star Trek line Leonard Nimoy recites in the movie; Star Trek was not the first movie to use that line and you can’t tell me if you had access to Leonard Nimoy you wouldn’t have him reciting old lines constantly as well!

Optimusgene is the chief editor of OneManAsylum.com and co-host of the Group Therapy podcast.