‘Transformers’ third installment lacks a clear plot
I saw
”
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
”
this weekend because a friend wanted to see it. I’ll admit that
I willingly saw the first movie as a throwback to childhood
nostalgia since my sister, cousins and I grew up playing with the
Hasbro toys and watching the cartoons. But for this third
installment, I would have skipped if someone else hadn’t been
enthusiastic about seeing it.
‘Transformers’ third installment lacks a clear plot
I saw “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” this weekend because a friend wanted to see it. I’ll admit that I willingly saw the first movie as a throwback to childhood nostalgia since my sister, cousins and I grew up playing with the Hasbro toys and watching the cartoons. But for this third installment, I would have skipped if someone else hadn’t been enthusiastic about seeing it.
The first movie was silly, with Shia LaBeouf playing oddball turned hero Sam Witwicky. He’s just a high schooler who wants a cool car and ends up with more than he bargained for when his beat-up yellow vehicle turns out to be an alien life form in the middle of an intergalactic fight. He and Bumblebee work with the other Autobots to defeat the evil Decepticons in a battle that calls in the Air Force, and takes out large chunks of Las Vegas.
The movie was short on plot, but it was at least funny with Sam’s goofy lines and his attempts to woo the hot girl from school, Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox.) But for me, the explosions and clashes between the Bots went on a little too long to make the movie an interesting watch. I skipped the sequel, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” when it came out in 2009.
I was a little concerned about seeing the third movie without having seen the second one, but I shouldn’t have worried since the movie had so little plot you don’t really need to understand the previous movies to follow the latter.
The movie starts out with some historical footage of John F. Kennedy and the lunar landing in the 1960s. Some scenes have been shot to look like historical footage to show the connection between the moon landing and the present. When the Americans landed on the moon, they checked out the dark side, where they found a ship crashed into a crater. But soon after the discovery, the space program gets shut down around the world and no one speaks of it again. It’s a long set-up for what eventually becomes the convoluted plot of the movie.
In the latest “Transformers” reiteration, Mikaela is nowhere to be seen, but against all odds Sam has a new gorgeous girlfriend. Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) has a perfect figure and a British accent. Most importantly, she is willing to support Sam until he gets a job. He’s finished college now, but his prospects are dim. He wants to work with the Autobots, but all of the transformers, including his car Bumblebee, are working on special ops for the government. Mearing, a government official played by Frances McDormand, won’t let Sam near the Bots because he doesn’t have clearance.
Without a job and without a nice car, it’s no wonder Sam feels threatened by Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), Carly’s suave boss who owns an antique car collection and races cars for fun. Dylan never really seems like a nice guy, so when he turns out to have an ulterior motive for treating Carly so well, it’s no surprise.
Though Sam feels threatened by Dylan, things look up briefly when he gets a job working for Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich) as a mail boy/binder stuffer. His job is boring until co-worker Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong), who is even weirder in the role than he normally is on screen, shoves some moon schematics at him. Wang worked on a project mapping the dark side of the moon, but he and his colleagues have been dying off in odd ways. Soon after the paper transfer, Wang is pushed out the window by a Decepticon and the office is attacked.
When Sam tries to tell Carly what happened, she wants him to stay out of the fight. She lost a brother in a war and she doesn’t want him to try to be a hero, too. But Sam wants to get the information to the Autobots about the Decepticon attack and the spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) immediately realizes that the craft is the one the Autobots sent out before their planet Cybertron was abandoned. The ship houses pillars that can be used to move materials through space and it might also house their former leader Sentinel Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy.)
From this point forward, the movie turns into a lot of high-speed chases, explosions and transformers clashing. In fact, the last third of the movie doesn’t look that much different from the end of the first movie, except that the final battle takes place in Chicago instead of Las Vegas.
The Decepticons are still on Earth and have just been waiting for the Autobots to play into their plan. They want Sentinel Prime brought back to Earth and brought back to life. The plot is loose, with not much point except to give a lot of reasons for a lot of explosions. And since the movie was played in 3-D, a lot of the scenes are shot more for that cool factor in 3-D than to add to the story. For those who see it in regular definition, some of the scenes just seem off.
The dialogue is riddled with cliches, what little there is between explosions. And though Sam is supposed to be a college graduate now, he’s hardly grown from the goofy teenager he was in the original film in 2007. The movie was disappointing even for fans of the first two, who wanted a little bit of plot to go with the action.
