Thursday, July 7, 2011

Review of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," or How to Feign Dread at CGI-inspired Horror & Awesome

“We’ll kill all of them.” It’s a line, asserted so assuredly by a pissed-off Optimus Prime, in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon, that makes geek fans go giddy. Considering everything that typically goes into a Michael Bay movie, maybe perhaps for once, we have not a perfect “Transformers” film, but a good one. Way, way - there’s no other way but up – better than “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and possibly on the verge of topping the original.

Of course, this has never been about character development, scripting or story line. (However, model Rosie Huntington-Whitely is considerably a marginal improvement over Megan Fox as the hottie by Shia LaBeauf’s side. (Hell, drywall would be an improvement over Megan Fox in the “acting” department.)

This is about special effects. This is about blowing up stuff real good. This is about all sorts of Autobots and Decepticons in an Earth-based battle of apocalyptic proportions. Humans die left and right to a greater extent in “Dark of the Moon” than in the previous two flicks. Los Angeles and New York get some bumps and bruises in the first two movies. Here, Washington D.C. and, especially Chicago, one of my favorite towns, gets destroyed up and down like nobody’s business. And visually, it’s rather epic.

With all the Autobots about to die, with Sam, his girlfriend this round, Epps and Lennox in perhaps the worst peril they’ve ever been in, and with all Earth hanging in the balance, there’s finally a darker, more thrilling aspect of cinematic “Transformers” in Part 3 than Bay and Steven Spielberg brought to the table in Parts 1 and 2.

Seeing that this perhaps Bay’s final “Transformers” movie as a director (too bad not his final, final movie ever), it’s a neat little sendoff. Is my ‘80s childhood for the better after seeing Michael Bay’s Transformers trilogy. Not necessarily, but to some certain degree, Bay redeemed himself from the carelessness of Part 2.

Now he’s free to make “Bad Boys 3.” Good luck with that.

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