Despite all the problems with Revenge of the Fallen, the movie still made money hand over fist, so Paramount immediately announced June 29, 2011 as the release date for Transformers 3. This was news to Michael Bay, who had already stated his intent to take a break from Transformers to shoot his bodybuilder comedy of errors, Pain & Gain. Reluctant to let someone else play in his sandbox, Bay put Pain & Gain on hold to get right to work on what would become Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Credit where it’s due, Bay & Co. acknowledged that Revenge of the Fallen was hot garbage, and thus dedicated themselves to making the next movie more streamlined, more dramatic1, and more spectacular in every conceivable way. This was also around the time when James Cameron’s Avatar convinced everyone that 3D was the next big thing, so lots of the effects work and cinematography was composed with 3D audiences in mind. Shooting for 3D required Bay’s trademark shaky camera and hyperactive editing to slow down and give scenes room to breath. As a result, Dark of the Moon is the first Transformers that looks and feels like a real movie. From a purely visual perspective, it’s a huge step up from the first two. The story, on the other hand… Well, we’re gonna have to talk about that.
The only thing Michael Bay loves more than the military is NASA. If you need proof, just look at Armageddon. Even if that movie paints NASA as a bunch of soft-handed eggheads, the guy can’t get enough of the spaceships and engineering and the whole Space Race narrative. But Dark of the Moon offers him a unique opportunity to rewrite history by placing the war between Autobots and Decepticons against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
As the film opens, President Kennedy kicks off the Space Race to get American boots on the moon before the Russians. The true purpose of their mission: to investigate a Cybertronian ship named The Ark that crash landed in the Sea of Tranquility. Our narrator, Optimus Prime, tells us that the key to the Autobots’ survival was housed inside, along with their leader, Sentinel Prime. In order to maximize the movie’s Star Trek-y nonsense potential, to give voice to Sentinel Prime Bay cast his actual cousin-in-law, Leonard Nimoy. Bay apparently had no idea Nimoy had played a Transformer before, having voiced Galvatron in the 1986 animated movie. This, like much of the film, was probably just a happy accident.
After an (honestly pretty cool) prologue where Bay pulls a Forrest Gump and uses CGI to fake a bunch of historical footage related to the Space Race, we’re plopped right back into the lap of Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf, practically vibrating with franchise senioritis). Three months out of college, and armed with a presidential medal for his involvement in Revenge of the Fallen, poor Sam can’t get a job, which his dad rags him about relentlessly. This is the one and only instance where I will ever identify with Sam Witwicky. In 2011, not long out of college myself, and competing in a post-financial crisis job market where most millennials couldn’t get arrested? Yeah, I get it. That shit sucked, Sam. But now with new girlfriend Carly (Rose Huntington-Whiteley2) in tow, Sam goes on a desperate, whirlwind tour of interviews set to Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”. This is a direct reference to Armageddon, where Bay uses the same song in a flight training montage. So right away, we’re situated in familiar territory; this movie’s gonna be nothing but wall-to-wall space shenanigans.
Sam finally lands a mailroom gig at aerospace firm Accuretta Systems, run by a tyrannical John Malkovich. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime and the Autobots find themselves taking orders from equally tyrannical NSA director Frances McDormand. These two showing up in the same movie leads me to believe that at some point, Bay had to have seen the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, and thought it would be fun to put that movie’s stars in this movie. Dark of the Moon put Bay’s own Coen-esque comedy on ice, so why not? It works, they’re both clearly having fun playing absolute wacko authority figures. But in a movie that’s already overflowing with big personalities and egos, they almost get lost in the shuffle.
And speaking of wackos with big personalities, ya know who else works at Accuretta Systems? Funnyman and Actual Doctor Ken Jeong! He plays Jerry Wang, a software developer targeted by the Decepticons for his involvement in the Ark conspiracy. Wang gives Sam detailed information about the procurement of Cybertronian pillars, smuggled off the Ark for use in some nefarious scheme. He does this in a very uncomfortable scene in a bathroom stall where he keeps referring to himself as “Deep Wang”. As in “Deep Throat”, linking this movie not just to the Apollo moon landings, but also to the Watergate scandal. (And also turning the reference into a deeply homophobic joke, but then let’s not.) Wang really only gets this one scene, because he’s very quickly thrown out a plate glass window by Laserbeak, a Decepticon assassin shaped like a vulture.
I only bring up Ken Jeong, because here in my neck of the woods he’s kind of a big deal. Raised in Greensboro, went to the same high school as my mom, studied medicine at Chapel Hill. He’s beloved around these parts. So beloved, in fact, that he’s been immortalized in spray paint on the side of one of our movie theaters.
That’s Ken Jeong, as Chow from The Hangover, but clearly using his dual-wielding guns shot from Dark of the Moon as a reference pose. So I would like to reiterate: There is a shot from Transformers: Dark of the Moon spray-painted on the side of Greensboro’s indie movie theater. The theater that shows micro-indies and Bollywood films and the like. The dissonance is staggering.
So at the risk of wasting too much time on plot again, let’s wrap this up. The Autobots recover Sentinel Prime and the last remaining pillars from the Moon, not realizing that this was the Decepticons’ plan all along. Sentinel wakes up and immediately announces that he’s brokered a deal with Megatron to use the pillars to open a doorway across space and time to bring the planet Cybertron into Earth’s atmosphere. The Decepticons capture the city of Chicago in the process, with the help of a rich car collector named Gould (Patrick Dempsey3), who also happens to be Sam’s girlfriend’s boss. Gould kidnaps Carly and takes her into the city, with only Sam and his old buddy Epps (Tyrese Gibson, having a hell of a year between this and Fast Five) to sneak into the city to save her. Of course, the Autobots show up, all hell breaks loose, and Michael Bay cannot help himself from having the Decepticons do a 9/11 and knock over a skyscraper.
Why 9/11? Because this movie is a blender, taking the big events of the last half century and mashing it all into one big history slurry. The Space Race, Watergate, 9/11, the Chernobyl disaster, the Challenger explosion… None of it is safe from Dark of the Moon, which finds ways to incorporate the settings into its plot—like the big first-act action sequence set in Chernobyl—or otherwise co-opt the imagery for its own needs. At one point the Autobots are ordered to leave the planet, so they hop aboard a souped-up Space Shuttle and take off, only for Starscream to show up and blow the thing up in a fireball that is eerily, almost irresponsibly, similar to the image of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding on live TV.
And that last one in particular feels like such a weird choice, because we’ve seen how much Michael Bay loves NASA. He loves it so much he somehow got the actual Buzz Aldrin to play himself in the movie! The movie itself came out less than a month before the final Space Shuttle launch on July 21st, 2011, and I’m sure that was no accident. They had to have known the shuttle program was about to shut down during production, right? So Bay’s final tribute to NASA on film (at least to date) is him taking one of the agency’s biggest tragedies and adapting it into a moment where he asks us to cry for a band of robots? A month before the final Shuttle launch, we got to watch a fake Shuttle explode in multiplexes all across America. It is in shockingly poor taste, and it’s the kind of thing that makes this movie often feel like a huge bummer.
It’s also what makes me so conflicted about this movie. At times, it really feels like Bay is getting the hang of this Transformers thing. The robot designs look a little bit cleaner; the big final battle on the streets of Chicago is genuinely thrilling, and Bay’s eye for action choreography is clearly improving. It’s a Good Looking Movie. But then you’re asked to pay attention to the plot and… Oh… Here’s two characters standing in a town that won’t be habitable again for thousands of years… Here’s a bunch of people falling out of a glass skyscraper… Here’s Agent Simmons (John Turturro, back again) being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, forcing us to remember when The O’Reilly Factor was one of the biggest TV shows in America. It’s just bummers all the way down with this movie.
And that includes the character of Sam Witwicky. He keeps telling people that he desperately wants to do something that matters in this war between Autobots and Decepticons, but what does he actually do? He freaks out about his girlfriend spending time with her boss because he’s jealous of the guy, and then has a screaming panic attack any time an adult tells him to settle down. Shia LeBeouf is visibly over this series, and at times it seems like he’s trying to burn the character to the ground before our very eyes. I kinda feel for him, because the guy had to know nobody was coming to these movies to see him. It’s not his fault. The movie is like a torture gauntlet for him, constantly forcing Sam into awkward, cringeworthy or otherwise dangerous scenarios where he has to worm his way out or die trying. I mentioned it last time, but Sam’s big moment at the end of this movie is when he manages to kill Starscream completely by accident. It’s his one lasting contribution to the arc of the franchise, as Starscream definitely does not return in part 4. (Then again, neither does Sam. We’ll technically see him again in part 5, but… We’ll get there.)
Dark of the Moon is such a mixed bag, and in the same summer that gave us Fast Five and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, it looks like a real stinker. But compared to Bay’s first two Transformers movies, Dark of the Moon is such an obvious step up. It may not be as narratively clean as the original, but it’s a huge improvement on the overbearing unpleasantness of the second. Say what you will about the story, but compared to the first two, Dark of the Moon is, once again, A Good Looking Movie. I somehow didn’t hate my time with it, though I’m willing to admit I’m pretty punch-drunk on Bay’s style at this point. Also, the movie managed to gross over a billion dollars. Steven Spielberg begged Michael Bay to stop after three, but the guy just couldn’t help himself. Optimus Prime Will Return.
NEXT TIME: Bay directed three for them. Now it’s time to do one for him.
- Bay himself said they were getting rid of all the ‘dorky humor’ of Revenge of the Fallen, which is a charitable way of saying they were ditching the racist comic relief Autobots Skids and Mudflap.
↩︎ - Bay cast Rose Huntington-Whiteley after working with her on a 2010 Victoria’s Secret commercial. Because of course he did.
↩︎ - Dempsey’s apparently a big car guy, like Michael Bay, who randomly bumped into Dempsey at a race track and asked him to be in the movie. ↩︎
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