Recently, Michael Bay placed part of the blame for the fiasco that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on the 2008 Hollywood writers’ strike. Judging by Transformers: Dark of the Moon, there may actually be something to that. The latest entry to the Transformers franchise is more cohesive, coherent and just a generally better film than its predecessors.

Qualifications aside, however, Dark of the Moon is still very much a Michael Bay movie, complete with all the visual bombast and grandiose action sequences that have become his trademark over the years. The plot, involving a decades-long conspiracy around some alien tech discovered during the first moon landing, is well-thought out, if rather rudimentary but at least it has the good sense to get out of the way after transporting the characters from one set piece to the next.

Check out the Moscow premier of Transformers: Dark of the Moon:




Along with big things going boom, another Michael Bay hallmark is jarring tonal shifts from frat-house humour to guts-and-glory heroism to drippy romance, sometimes all within the same scene. Shia LeBeouf probably bears as much responsibility as Bay for this.

And, speaking of LeBeouf, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: in a movie that claims that the Space Race happened because an alien craft crash-landed on the moon and revolves mainly around a power-struggle between super-intelligent shape-shifting alien robots, its most unbelievable aspect is the relationship between Shia LeBeouf and Megan Fox replacement/Michael Bay lust object Rosie Huntington-Whitely.

Huntington-Whitely was clearly chosen for her comfort with extreme high-angle camera shots and her inability to fully close her mouth. Her character functions mostly on a visual level, but even visually it just doesn’t make sense for her to appear in the same frame as LeBeouf (or anyone else for that matter).

While the supporting cast, which includes John Malkovich, Francis McDormand, John Turturro and Alan Tudyk, inject some fun into proceedings, one gets the sense that the person having the most fun with Huntington-Whitely’s role is Michael Bay himself.

The verdict: Bay has tightened up the action and toned down the more blatantly offensive elements of the franchise. That said, the finished product is still loud, abrasive and probably best enjoyed by die-hard fans/military fetishists.
 
Transformers: Dark of the Moon will be broadcast on M-Net and M-Net HD on Sun 8 Jul.