Heaven help me, I just saw Transformers: Dark of the Moon and…it wasn’t terrible.  I think quite possibly there is something wrong with my brain… The Transformers films have to be right up there on the short list of “movies with the stupidest basic premise,” and I’d successfully avoided the two previous pictures in the series (and was too old for the original toys/cartoons), but for some reason I joined the throngs of holiday-weekend filmgoers and spent over two hours of my life watching CGI robots and explosions.

A viewer with no idea of the “Transformers” universe might have a difficult time grasping the basic plot—which occupies the first hour of the film—but the second half is pure action and (as much as it shames me to say it), rather exciting action at that.  It’s true, the sheer impossibility of the destructive spectacle, the incoherent plot twists and the heavy reliance on CGI dilutes the pleasure a bit, but the pace is so frantic that you hardly have to time to scoff at the silly bits or attempt to make logical sense of what’s going on.  

In short, the evil Decepticons trick the Autobots (oh, merely typing those names makes me feel…dumb) and their human allies into retrieving Sentinel Prime from the moon, where the giant robot has been buried since his ship crashed there  in the early 1960s.  Sentinel Prime has a plan to conquer Earth and use its resources to rebuild the Autobot planet Cybertron.  Can the evil robots’ plan be foiled?  Yes, probably, but only after Chicago, for some reason selected as the Decepticon base of operations, is thoroughly trashed by the metallic invaders.

Like the recent X-Men: First Class, Transformers: Dark of the Moon takes a revisionist look at history: the NASA moon landings were made primarily to investigate the alien spaceship crash site, and the program was subsequently cancelled as part of the Decepticon plot.  In a curious bit of stunt-casting, astronaut Buzz Aldrin portrays himself and admits to NASA’s hidden agenda (at least the movie doesn’t suggest the moon landings were faked, Aldrin might have balked at that).  

Transformers: Dark of the Moon also features a stereotypical Washington bureaucrat (played with a straight face by Frances McDormand), who evokes “national security” at the drop of a hat and initially derides the attempts of Sam (Shia LeBeouf) to warn her about the Decepticon menace.  This negative portrayal of the government is somewhat offset by some positive images of the (quasi-) military, although the film’s few awkward attempts at “hooray for America” sentiments seem oddly misplaced (the use of the Autobots as “enforcers” for the UN in the film’s early scenes also feels strange).  The Decepticons and Autobots may have chosen the USA as their battleground, but the threat is to the entire Earth, so shots of a tattered American flag, the destruction of the Lincoln Memorial, and other America-centric patriotic bits strike a false note.

Whether or not it was a fake “controversy” ginned up for publicity purposes, the replacement of Megan Fox as Sam’s love interest with model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley received a fair amount of media attention prior to the film’s release.  Not having seen the first two films—nor, for that matter, any movie featuring Megan Fox, with the exception of Jonah Hex—I can’t make a judgement about the respective acting talents of Fox or Huntington-Whiteley (in her debut film).  And they’re both reasonably good-looking women, though Huntington-Whiteley’s lips appear to have had an intimate relationship with the collagen injector.  In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Huntington-Whiteley is game, running and falling and ducking in the action sequences and standing around attractively at other times (the fact that she’s taller than Shia LeBeouf certainly isn’t her fault).  

Speaking of LeBeouf, it’s hip in some circles to criticise him but he’s perfectly adequate here.  He’s joined by John Malkovich (under-used), Patrick Dempsey (satisfactory villain), John Turturro (amusing), Tyrese Gibson (his usual role), and Ken Jeong (again, a standard Ken Jeong performance, which is to say, wacky).  

In addition to the last hour of spectacular mayhem, Transformers: Dark of the Moon also earned points with me for some intentionally humorous bits of dialogue and “business.”  The aforementioned Ken Jeong scenes are really…odd, Malkovich and Turturro also have brief moments of eccentricity, and even Frances McDormand and her faithful assistant evoke a smile or two.  Of course, plenty of the bits fall flat: the “humourous” scenes with Sam click about once every 10 tries, and the “funny” Autobots Brains and Wheelie are never as amusing as they are intended to be.  Still, credit must be given for a light-hearted undertone throughout the first half of the film (and sporadically afterwards, though the constant explosions and screaming and shooting and crashing and destruction and more explosions tend to drown out everything else in the last hour).

I don’t want to make too much of my not-disliking Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  Frankly, if you’ve read many of my reviews, you’ll know I don’t hate too many films (I tend to avoid those towards which I have a strongly negative predisposition).  As I wrote above, the “Transformers” concept is in itself flawed due to its toy-company origins: aliens who transform into automobiles, trucks, and other Earth machines?  Oh, alright…that’s good enough for a cartoon show, but three feature films?  The robot-camouflage premise isn’t wholly jettisoned in this film (Decepticon disguises include a wristwatch, copy machine, and computer monitor…*squints at my monitor suspiciously*), though (in the case of the Autobots at least) it serves no particular narrative (as opposed to marketing) purpose, since the whole world already knows about the Autobots and Decepticons.  The sentient robot “race” (the good ones, anyway) might as well remain in their humanoid-robotic form all the time.

So yes, the whole series starts with a strike or two against it.  Luckily, the second half of Transformers: Dark of the Moon has very little “it’s a truck, no wait, it’s a giant robot!” footage, concentrating instead on blowing things up real good.  However, this brings up the matter of the film’s excessive length.  I suppose Michael Bay and Ehren Kruger, the director and writer, respectively, felt they needed some “plot” to balance out the hour of mayhem which concludes the movie, so they spend a lot of time on mostly pointless stuff in the first hour: Sam looking for a job, Sam’s relationship with his girlfriend, Sam and his parents, Autobots as world police, Decepticons assassinating various scientists, backstory and sub-plots, guest appearances by Buzz Aldrin and Bill O’Reilly, and so on and so forth.  None of this is especially interesting or entertaining, though I confess the plethora of disparate elements—the script veers off on a new tangent every 5 minutes or so— keeps it from being boring.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon isn’t bad, it’s even entertaining in its own noisy, hyper-active manner.  Perhaps that’s all a “summer movie” needs to be as long as we don’t confuse this with art, or even with a “good” film.