Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The Autobots and Decepticons battle once again in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, one group caring for the future of humanity, the other, not so much.

Enjoyed the first act of the film as Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) struggles to find a job, competently dealing with the shocks of the working world while reservedly accepting that successfully defeating the forces of evil twice does not necessarily guarantee that one will find full-time rewarding employment. Nevertheless, he still finds a position in the mail room of an innovative company and proceeds to prove himself while impressing partner Carly Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) and mollifying his ill-tempered father (Kevin Dunn).

Until fellow employee Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong) suddenly provides him with top secret intelligence regarding the Ark, a spacecraft which escaped Cybertron during its transformational Armageddon and proceeded to crash land on Earth's moon.

Reunited with Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), they then unravel a plot involving the stockpiling of pillars on the moon and the murder of many of the people involved with American and Russian moon missions.

It turns out an Autobot named Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy) piloted the Ark away from Cybertron in order to ensure the Autobots's survival, but had really struck a deal with Megatron (Hugo Weaving) to betray them, believing that the future of the Transformers would pay more dividends in Decepticon hands.

With the help of Spencer's boss and Witwicky's rival Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey), the Decepticons conquer the earth and prepare to use Sentinel's technology to transport Cybertron to its solar system.

There are many quirky scenes that make the first act stand out, including the struggles of Alan Tudyk's character Dutch, awkward elevator encounters, and Sam and Jerry's discussion in the stall of a men's washroom. These scenes infuse the film with a catchy comedic sensibility that lightens the tension and disrupts the action, briefly, the sharp introduction of a distinct staccato which doesn't ruin the overall affect as it did in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (the comedy in a Transformers film finally worked for me).

The film also features the significant transitions most of the characters have entertainingly negotiated since Revenge of the Fallen, which, I suppose, is one of the principle points.

As if we're all Transformers.

Transformers 3's second act is primarily concerned with the Autobot/human counterattack and the momentum fluidly built up beforehand stalls significantly. I suppose if you have a constructed bountiful world that is then devastated it makes sense to ensure that its dynamic isn't present in the Decepticon aftermath. But it also makes sense to then build towards a salient climax wherein that world's productivity is brilliantly revitalized, and Dark of the Moon does contain a climax and its origins are revitalized, but the content used to fill this traditional form didn't exactly motivate me, apart from the quasi-rapprochement entre Simmons and Mearing (Frances McDormand).

Nonetheless, its saving grace is represented by how it presents the ways in which the right perverts "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" maxim, by placing it in Decepiticon hands, who, basically want to bring their world to ours, or supplant Earth's culture with another, the imperialist few using their resources to destroy the longevity of the many, in the interests of the one, the dark of the moon (note the necessity of maintaining a prominent place for the study of First Nations culture within educational systems).