Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Synopsis, Part III (the real one)
I was really into Capricorn One when I was a kid, not because I gave even a second thought to moon landing conspiracy theories, but because, goddamnit people, Elliott Gould, James Brolin AND O.J. Simpson? James Brolin chewed up the screen the year before in that weird-ass The Car movie where he battled an automobile possessed by the devil. Spielberg’s Duel may be the canonical evil vehicle flick, but an (unidentified) human being manned the tractor-trailer in that one. And Christine? Well, it’s Carpenter and it’s over the top but it’s too much of a parable for me - The Car is not only weirder and more purely a thriller, it’s also got a much more badass, sinister-looking car, plus some maniacal explosions at the end. Capricorn One featured the red-hot Brolin, plus O.J., Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Karen Black and TELLY FUCKING SAVALAS. You couldn’t assemble a better cast than that over an entire Love Boat season.
So, when I saw the trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, though I’d never seen the other Transformer movies, I thought, well, I have to see this, because it’s moon conspiracy shit, and damn it, I love me some goofy moon landing coverups. Plus, well, EXPLOSIONS, and it’s fucking hotter than hell here in Texas, so why not spend a few hours in an extended adolescent frisson. Also, a Michael Bay movie is like a satirized version of itself — it’s so balls-out, so in-your-face, so leaden with cheesy moments and mind-blowing pyrotechnics, that it’s got the same unintentionally humorous effect of one of those nutjob Mississippi congressional candidate commercials. You can’t even make fun of it, because it’s already as absurd and racist and tone-deaf as anyone could ever possibly be. The only satire of a Michael Bay movie is a Michael Bay movie.
This one starts with a juicy moon landing conspiracy in which all these Hasbro toys are engaged in a megawar on planet Jumbotron or something and then one of them gets away just as the bad toys are getting ready to take over and eventually lands on the moon. Turns out, then, that the moon shot program was all a coverup to see what kind of stuff actually landed on the other side of the moon, and Armstrong high-tailed it over to this crashed spaceship and took some shit out of it. In the meantime the bad toys on earth, which have apparently been beaten down in previous chapters of the series, are gathering themselves up in the African savannah (why Africa?) and preparing to bring some kind of ruckus, because there’s some other space detritus at Chernobyl, and all of this stuff ties together in ways that make absolutely no sense, but then this badass looking drain auger robot monster starts tearing up Chernobyl but some stupid semi truck robot defeats him, and then they take the stuff back to the U.S. and then that nun from Nanny McPhee, who looks damn hot here, although kinda brittle and still sexually repressed, takes the stuff from the moon and locks it up in a giant safe.
In the meantime, there is this dork with a smoking hot girlfriend who lives in Washington DC who’s saved the world a couple of times and is job hunting, and he gets a job with John Malkovich, who has a hilarious spray tan and will apparently do anything these days, but then dork gets homoerotically assaulted by the Asian guy who showed us his tiny penis in The Hangover. This guy hands over all his conspiracy theory stuff to dork and then gets killed, and everything goes haywire and then all of the sudden John Turturro is grinding through scenery like a fucking wood chipper and is on the O-Reilly factor and then HOLY SHIT BUZZ ALDRIN is in this movie.
So we get a lot of comic relief from that guy from Serenity, who plays Turturro’s bodyguard, and then there is a scene in a Russian bar that makes no sense, then a disappointing chase scene that does not have nearly enough destruction, but in fact it’s just a tease, because you know what you came here for, and you know that Mr. Bay is going deliver the goddamn goods, and then what do you know, the ENTIRE LAST HOUR of this movie is pretty much NOTHING BUT EXPLOSIONS AND MAD ROBOT FU.
The bad robots try to send the good robots into space, and some of these good robots have ethnic accents, (what the hell?) but then the good robots didn’t actually get on the space shuttle, and they come back to wage war on the Adult Megaplexxx, which has taken over Chicago and is going to beam the Jumbotron planet over here next to earth and make everyone on earth their slaves, even though, I mean, what the fuck, how stupid are these robots because putting a giant planet right next to earth is going to completely fuck up orbits and gravity and all that shit and the whole damn mess will probably spiral into the sun or something but MICHAEL BAY DOES NOT FUCKING CARE ABOUT YOUR STUPID GRAVITATIONAL FORCES, PEOPLE.
What Michael Bay cares about is blowing shit up in new and innovative ways, and I’m down with that, although the robot fu is frankly unimpressive, because robots can only break shit over each other’s heads and stuff so many times before it looks like you’re just watching a bad bar fight or some MMA crap. Thankfully, Michael Bay decides to pretty much destroy most of Chicago, and if you love your destruction porn, man, this shit is for you. We get entire buildings sliced in half, all Fruit Ninja-style, then landing on OTHER buildings, causing all sorts of absolutely mind-bending, sliding down and off building fu. There’s crazy batman-suit skydiving fu, cruise missiles blowing shit up everywhere, giant robot spaceships crashing into buildings, wanton destruction of landmarks and, finally Barton Fink making out with that chick from Nanny McPhee with some super cheeseball music to end it all.
Make no mistake: this is an unmitigated pile of narrative horseshit. Nothing makes any sense at all. Most of the humor is juvenile yet there are unexpectedly racy jokes and an ass shot at the beginning that probably gave every teenage boy in the theatre uncomfortable wood. All that said, you’ve got Buzz Aldrin (!) and a director who destroys shit better than a fat guy at an Asian buffet. You may walk out of here feeling like the first time you saw a particular kind of porn you thought you’d never like: guilty, dirty, horrified, shamed - yet strangely satisfied.
