REVIEW: Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Dwarfed by the metallic Goliaths that duke it out above their heads, the humans in Transformers: Dark of the Moon duck and run and tumble and fall from building to car chassis to street; they are plucked from tilting skyscrapers, swung, tossed and finally gently lowered to the ground by steely robot fingers. Each character requires about ten deus-ex-machina saves from their robot overlords, just in order to keep them alive through a single scene. Forget about them fighting back. Forget making even the politest of forays into the action. Even the hundreds of rescues that allow them their tiny inch of space on the dramatic plane of the movie throw them around with a force that would concuss or kill them instantly. This is not the same thing as suspense: the feeling of pleasurable anticipation that one feels when someone on screen is in jeopardy, or narrowly avoids death. The director Michael Bay has cemented a new threat differential that is inhuman, anti-human — post-human. The characters are like fruit flies in a movie about the pyramids, lemurs in a dinosaur movie, wives in a biopic. They are not so much lucky to be alive as they are grateful to be allowed to share the stage, kept in place only by the constant renewals of goodwill from everyone concerned — the Autobots, the Decepticons, Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg, Paramount studios. Maybe that's why they are all so thin-skinned. They may not be able to make the slightest dent in the metal gigantosaurs that dominate the screen, or defend planet earth from so much as a rain shower, but boy do they throw the mother of all hissy fits if you point this out. They're as defenceless against an unkind word as the robots are inviolate. "You're just a messenger," Frances McDormand tells Shia la Boeuf in one scene. Two hours of robot carnage later and it's still burning him up. "How's that for a messenger!" he shouts at the top of his lungs as he avenges himself, not even against McDormand, but someone else entirely — Patrick Dempsey I think it was — in the film's climax. That's the way of this movie: the robots unleash robot armageddon while the humans merely bitch or stir up trouble — "Dick", "He called you a dick" and so on. The audience I was with whooped up every diss, except the one where McDormand says, “We cannot entrust national security matters to teenagers," at which point the theatre was enveloped in a deathly hush, as if a small hole had opened up in the space-time fabric of the Michael Bay movieverse, and all we could do was stare at it and hope someone would be along to fix it soon. I'd heard if not great things about the film going into it, then things to the effect of: Michael Bay finally out-Gonzoed himself with a megadeath super-spectacle that tilts the entire multiplex into gobsmacked awe. And it's true: he has. And it's still just "not boring." All those billions of dollars and millions of man hours and squadrons of effects technicians the result is still a film that is neither boring, nor quite exciting, but leaves the audience's pulse exactly as it finds it. The kid I was sat next to kept up a steady chatter throughout the entire film and during the action sequences merely raised his voice to be heard. Now there's an audience member after Bay's heart. C