AMOK TIME : Michael Bay’s ‘TRANSFORMERS – DARK OF THE MOON’ [7/10]

Published on: July 1st, 2011

“It’s a visual and therefore visceral betrayal!” So sneers John Malkovich’s Bruce Brazos quite early on in Transformers – Dark of the Moon, third instalment in Michael Bay’s series of blockbusters (mainly aimed at teenagers and adults) based on the early-80s toy/cartoon phenomenon (mainly aimed at pre-teen children). As before, the story concerns an ongoing civil war between two rival types (species? brands?) of alien, sentient, ultra-advanced mechanical/electronic beings – the benevolent, freedom-loving Autobots and the malign, tyrannical Decepticons – fought out on Planet Earth, with the human race’s fate depending on the outcome.

But whereas one might expect – given Malkovich’s track-record of playing devious, duplicitous villains – Bruce Brazos to be a Quisling-style arch-traitor, he’s a fairly irrelevant supporting character, merely the dyspeptic boss of youthful hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). And the “betrayal” of which he speaks doesn’t relate to any kind of interplanetary nefariousness – it’s the distinctly trivial matter of one of his hapless employees using the wrong-coloured coffee-mug.

Nevertheless, it’s clearly no accident that the dialogue should so explicitly equate the visual and the visceral – as Transformers III is, like its two predecessors (Transformers [2007] and Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen [2009] all about sensory overload and sensory assault, here taken to another level by the switch to 3-D. With eight previous features under his belt, this is Bay’s first foray into 3-D and – unsurprisingly, given his career-long emphasis on visual spectacle – he relishes the eye-popping capabilities of the third dimension, making this (along with Avatar, The Hole, Piranha and Jackass 3-D) that rare example of a mainstream picture that warrants the extra expense and hassle of the stereoscopic format.

It helps that Bay’s working with truly state-of-the-art digital computer effects as provided by veteran FX guru John Frazier (whose credits stretch all the way back to the original Hills Have Eyes), nimbly integrated with Amir Mokri’s incessantly slick, honey-lustrous cinematography. At its best, Transformers III achieves moments of absurd, transcendent grandeur – the ‘camera’ flying through impossible, near-abstract vistas of churning, colossal metal as Steve Jablonsky’s thudding score hammers home the immensity of it all.

Crucially, the giant robots here – which, in accordance with the absurd toy/cartoon originals, can turn into conventional motor-vehicles for camouflage purposes – have real solidity and weight, and the picture comes alive when they’re dominating proceedings, usually smashing each other to smithereens or, in the case of the Decepticons, reducing much of inner-city Chicago to smouldering rubble. Because at its core Transformers III is really no more or less than another slam-bang aliens-invade-America epic – and in terms of budget and scope it is to Battle Los Angeles what Battle Los Angeles was to Skyline.

Story-wise, it’s no more sophisticated than either – indeed, the backstories of the Autobots and Decepticons mainly serve to unneccessarily complicate proceedings, especially when the long-dormant Sentinel Prime (the “Einstein” of the Decepticons, we’re told) is reactivated and enters the fray. But the latter does provide Leonard Nimoy with the opportunity to contribute some suitably magisterial vocal stylings – though as usual it’s Sam’s best-pal Autobot, Bumblebee, who provides the neatest grace-notes, as he’s only able to communicate through snippets of dialogue from other movies.

Just as, indeed, the Transformers pictures communicate with regurgitated scenes and ideas from countless sci-fi predecessors – sometimes the homages are directly acknowledged, as with the steady stream of references to and quotations from Star Trek, including a brief, amusing glimpse of Nimoy-as-Spock via a handily-positioned TV (showing the episode identified as “the one where Spock goes nuts”, i.e. Amok Time [1967].)

Such moments – along with hammy turns by the likes of Malkovich, Ken Jeong, Alan Tudyk (seemingly channeling Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno as the decidedly Teutonic “Dutch”), Frances McDormand, and series regular John Turturro (McDormand and Turturro laughingly improv their way through a droll mid-endcredits “stinger”), add welcome touches of (relative) class to an enterprise which is generally content to blunderbuss its way along with a swaggering, bigger-is-better bombast. This in contrast to the other current sci-fi extravaganza positing an alternative history of 1960s America, X-Men First Class (both pictures even feature JFK in archive-footage ‘cameo’ appearances) – doing so with a certain snazzy, 007-inspired élan.

And whereas X-Men‘s mutant-rights issues are transparently intended as allegorical, puzzling over the symbolism and deeper implications of Ehren Kruger’s script here is a trickier, thornier exercise (there’s rather more fun to be found in spotting his borrowings from certain recent Doctor Who storylines). Kruger certainly doesn’t shy away from the gung-ho US-centric patriotism of Battle Los Angeles (the Decepticons may be taking over the world, but the picture very seldom strays from the shores of continental USA.)

It’s meanwhile noticeable that whereas the Autobots speak fluent American-English (several of them even have ‘comic’ British accents) many of the Decepticons chatter evilly away in some indecipherable, unsubtitled metallic ‘tongue’. In a similar vein, the first major Decepticon attack on humanity begins with what appears to be a malfunctioning state-of-the-art photocopier – an ‘inscrutable’, device which its frustrated office-bod user describes, with some dismay, as “very Japanese”, just before it sprouts arms, legs and wings and starts throwing various personnel, including Malkovich’s fatuous Brazos, around the building.

Workplace discontents are a running theme of Dark of the Moon, rather appropriate given one popular creation-myth regarding the Autobots and Decepticons (there are several), in which they are the same species divided between workers (Autobots) and soldiers (Decepticons) – this theory endowing their civil war with a distinctly Marxist tinge. Smash-the-state rhetoric is predictably thin on the ground in this latest big-screen outing, which is structured around the difficulties that face the hapless Witwicky as, chagrined by having to rely on his high-earning girlfriend Carly (strictly-eyecandy newcomer Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) he attempts to enter the ruthless, hostile, credit-crunched  job-market – despite having saved Earth during each of the past two Transformers pictures, and despite being given a Medal of Honor (by President Obama, no less!) at the start of this one. It seems that all he’s really cut out for is planet-saving – not the kind of employment one often sees advertised down at the local labour-exchange, of course, but a position which, in Bay’s universe, now crops up with grim regularity every other year.

Neil Young
1st July, 2011

seen at Empire cinema, Sunderland (3D) 1st July 2011 (£6.75)
Transformers  - Dark of the Moon : [7/10] : USA 2011 : Michael BAY : 155m (BBFC) : {18/28}