David Larsen honestly thought he might enjoy the new Michael Bay movie.
Michael Bay on the Transformers 4 set
The new Transformers film can be reviewed in one sentence, and here it is: only see this movie if you enjoyed the last one. A wise man would get up from the keyboard now and walk away. Just … can’t … do it.
But let’s skip the frothing and the ranting. Is that okay? I can’t find the energy, and in any case other people have got it covered. Read this if you want the argument that Michael Bay is morally equivalent to a heroin pusher in the junior school playground, or this if you’d prefer a straightforward analysis of the film’s failure to entertain, morals be damned. Myself, I’m mostly just bewildered. This movie offers you nearly indistinguishable giant robots hitting each other, Shia LaBeouf at his very least appealing, and many lingering close-ups of a lingerie model’s bottom. It’s nearly three hours long. Are we really all going to flock to it? Of course we are.
Me included. I have been using Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as the definitive one-stop-shop instance of every sin a Hollywood blockbuster can commit ever since I stumbled blearily out of Auckland’s Imax theatre two years ago, wondering what had possessed me to sit in the third row. Yet I still managed to persuade myself the new film might be a fun night out. I’d love to pretend this is because I possess that priceless reviewerly virtue, an open mind, but the reality is that I’m an easy mark. Aim a gigadollar publicity machine at my head and I’m helpless. Sad but true. I console myself that I have a lot of company.
The night before I saw Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I had to go to a screening of a documentary about motorbike racing. I am as far from being a petrol head as it is possible to be, and for boring logistical reasons this particular screening was difficult for me to get to: I attended with very bad grace. It was fantastic. The film releases in late August and I’ll write about it in more detail then, but there are three interesting Transformers comparisons. First, the motorbike film took a subject I have no interest in whatsoever and made me understand its appeal. In fact it made me feel its appeal. It put me inside the head of people who are excited about something that doesn’t excite me, and my world is never going to look the same again. This is one of the great gifts film can give you, and if Michael Bay were capable of it, this would be a review about the wondrous, unlikely fact that I spent two evenings in a row on the edge of my seat, worrying about the fate of fast moving hunks of metal and their human symbiotes. He isn’t. I didn’t.
Second, the motorbike film is in 3D. So is Transformers: Dark of the Moon. So I saw two 3D films in a row, on consecutive nights, and I am newly in love with the technology. Speed and danger become so much more visceral with the addition of visual depth; and yes, I’m talking about the motorbike film. All Bay gains from 3D is that it forces him to move away from the nauseating fast-cutting action sequences of the previous film. The big fight scenes are built up from longer takes this time, and that’s certainly something to be thankful for. But there are moments that ought to look astonishing in 3D – the scene where soldiers jump out of helicopters and fly in free-fall formation through the half-ruined buildings of down-town Chicago, for instance, ought to be as purely spectacular as the aerial battle in Avatar. It isn’t. Bay has not committed the worst 3D sin – this is not one of those grubby 3D conversions that looks better with the glasses off – but that’s the most you can say.
Third, I know perfectly well that a film about a subject I’m not interested in has the potential to be revelatory, and I know an evening with Michael Bay can be painful. But I was not looking forward to the motorbike film, and I was actually quite excited about Transformers: Dark of the Moon. A packed-out Imax theater, the fact that no one anywhere had seen the film yet, the sense of an event … and I like a big-budget action film, and Bay had admitted in an interview with Empire that the second Transformers was a bit of a mess, so surely he’d be on his mettle this time. And no Megan Fox, that’s a win right there! And – oh good grief David, you’re pathetic. There was a big marketing campaign, the trailer looked pretty, and you fell for it. Please learn better in time to avoid Transformers 4.
A Transformer
In retrospect, it was ridiculous to imagine Bay would learn from his mistakes in Revenge of the Fallen. Mistakes? The film made nearly a billion dollars! The commercial logic is remorseless: everything that seemed bizarrely extraneous about that film has now become part of the brand. The Shia LaBeouf character’s creepy parents, the brazen slo-mo tours of Megan Fox’s anatomy, the random sub-sitcom gestures in the direction of showing us LaBeouf’s character Growing Up and Having A Life – not only are these inflicted on us again (Megan Fox having been replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, apparently on the basis that she’s roughly the same shape), they’re allowed to dominate the film’s first hour. An hour is a long time: this one especially. An average episode of Doctor Who introduces, imperils and rescues an entire planet in less time than it takes Bay’s story to get out of bed. Even people who love the later parts of the film, in which Bay seems to shrug and say “Okay, let’s blow stuff up now”, are going to tell you to arrive late so you can skip that first hour, and it’s sound advice.
I did not love the fight scenes, happy as I was to get to them. This is what puzzles me the most about the success of these films: when you get past everything that seems obviously misconceived about them and concentrate on what might be called their core business, they’re about bits of metal that can turn into other bits of metal, going mano a mano with bits of metal than can turn into yet more bits of metal. Fights between things that don’t have clearly defined shapes are right up there with dream sequences in the list of easily mishandled visual storytelling elements. Even though many of these robots have identifying colour schemes, there were whole scenes in which I couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad. In fact there were scenes in which I had no clear sense of where one robot ended and the next began. You can go after Bay for brain-dead militarism, for misogyny, for all sorts of things that do, yes, matter, but isn’t he at least supposed to be good at action?
Shia LaBeouf and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
I will grant Transformers: Dark of the Moon this: it’s better than the previous film in the series. More coherent, less visually chaotic. This is like praising a violinist for not attempting to perform with four broken strings, but if you liked Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and millions did, then your odds of liking this one are excellent. Incidentally, I’ve decided to start calling films with double-barrelled titles Colon Movies. Watching them so often puts me in mind of being trapped in the digestive system of a large, slow-moving monster. Toilet humour, Shia LaBeouf screaming and robots pummelling robots: Michael Bay proudly offers you three hours in the belly of the beast.
TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, directed by Michael Bay, in cinemas now.