Transformers: Dark of the Moon…IN THREE DIMENSIONS!!!

Well, what can I say?  I could go into this as the ultimate cynic and talk about everything that went wrong….or I could try to point out all the improvements our erstwhile director has made to the franchise.  Either of those would be wrong, wrong, dirty dirty lies.  In truth, for everything Michael Bay fixed, he found something else to screw up.  I’m beginning to think that it’s all on purpose.

First off, the movie I was least looking forward to seeing was, of course, the winner of the ‘what movie should I subject myself to TWICE’ poll.  Hence, I decided to see it the way Mr. Bay demands it first, and then in lowly 2D sometime tomorrow or Sunday.  Since I ponied up the bling to get my 3D specs and watch the action as ‘it was intended,’ I will simply fill this space up with what I think worked and didn’t work as far as action and camera goes.  I will save all of my fiery anger towards the acting and plot after I watch it a second time.

Damn you.

So, was this worth paying up to 50% more on your movie ticket to see in 3D?  Probably not.  Yes, it was much better looking than such filthy, disgusting 3D-rendered movies like Alice and Clash of the Titans, but there were very few scenes that seemed like they really relied on the technology.  For the most part the extra dimension was used in conjunction with slow-to-fast-to-slow motion action sequences so that the sword/gun/bullet was COMING RIGHT FOR YOU OH SHIT YOU’D BETTER DUCK OH MAN YOU ALMOST DIED! 

The action sequences are exactly what you would expect, no more and no less.  There are giant robots and things exploding and a really stupid 20-headed worm thing that serves no purpose other than to extend one stand-alone scene beyond the 20 minute mark.  You get very little action in the first hour, and then the rest of the movie turns into one extended fight/flight scene for the next 100 minutes.  It’s exhausting, yet unfulfilling.  It also seemed like Bay was just mocking me.

At one point I actually stopped and gaped, realizing that the action scene I was witnessing was a stable camera shot for over a full minute!  Of course, the moment I realized that, the camera went back into what I like to call ‘fuck your detail’ mode, and everything went back to whizzing around so much that I had a hard time telling what was going on.  If the Autobots didn’t have such distinctive coloring as compared to the Decepticons, I swear that I would have never known who the hell was fighting who.  The Decepticons especially were incredibly cookie-cutter to the point that I'm not sure which ones lived and died. Seriously, I don’t really know what movies started this trend, but this shit has got to stop.  If I’m going to pay money to watch the good guys punch out the bad guys, the least you could do is make sure I can tell who the hell is who.

Bay did learn something about giant robot design while completely ignoring the bigger picture.  Yes, there are no racist Transformers.  Still, all the 'new' ones are pointless, irritating, or absolutely stupid.  There are how many damn Autobots from the original series?  Several new good guys pop up for this film, and every single one of them is unique to this movie.  What the hell, Bay?  Also, the winner of the dumbest Autobot ever created goes to Que, who is incredibly idiotic-looking.  Supposedly he is designed to look like Albert Einstein, but if that is true then it's by way of Pablo Picasso.  His only purpose for existing is to offer the Deus Ex Machina required to save Shia Lebouff's life later in the film.  So not only is Que just a lazy plot device, he also saves the most annoying character in the series.  Bummer.

I’ll save the bitching about the terrible acting and worse plot for this weekend.  Enjoy the tang of pointless violence, people!

Note:  I don’t want to go too deep into spoiler territory, but yet again the writers decided it would be awesome to make one of my favorite Autobots go out like a little bitch.  It seems killing Jazz like a punk just wasn’t enough for them.