TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

The last one was bad. It was reeeaaally bad. It was one of the worst blockbusters of the last decade, perhaps ever. It was bad on so many different levels that multiple term papers could be dedicated to its shear and complete awfulness.

Even director Michael Bay noticed. This is a major accomplishment for the 46 year old director/Scott Backula doppelganger who is notoriously arrogant and seems to shun critical opinions of his own films. Yet it seems that every lick of press Bay has done for his new installment, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” has had him acknowledging that the last one was bad and promising that this film would be better.

And it’s clear that he has been trying. He’s toned down the crass humor, eliminated most of the more annoying characters (though a few remain) and has focused on telling a story with a discernable plot, a passible mystery and actual characters with simple, clearly defined goals! The result is a film that has characters that I kinda cared about, not a lot, but just enough.

The film starts with an interesting prologue telling us that the Space Race was created in response to a mysterious crash on the Moon. What crashed was a lost Autobot spacecraft containing a secret weapon. From there we catch up with Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) who has traded his stuttering problem in for Peter Parker-lite angst about having saved the world and not being able to translate that into real world success. He also has a new girlfriend (Rose Huntington Whitley) Sam is worried that he's going to lose her. He should worry; she's waayy out of his league. I won't reveal much more, just to say that this all intertwines in a manner that is a reasonably convincing by Michael Bay standards, and concludes with an all out war on downtown Chicago.

That destruction of Chicago sequence might be the best thing Bay has ever done. It takes up a nice, long chunk of the film and allows him to indulge in that thing that Michael Bay does best—blow stuff up. Even the editing of the action scenes are better in this film, his use of 3D in “Dark of the Moon” has forced him to relax his infamous MTV editing style (quick cuts in 3D can give viewers headaches). For once in a Michael Bay film the viewer actually has a fighting chance to understand and follow the action sequences. The 3D itself was great too it was really appropriate for a film of this cheese level.

This is really the first film in the series that actually delivers on the promise of the Transformers concept—giant robots destroying stuff on a massive scale. The first film lacked the budget to really show off the robots properly, the second was too bad for me to really care. This film is just barely good enough that I could actually enjoy the mindless, absurdly expensive spectacle of things going “Boom Boom Kaboom!”

So in summation, I accept your apology Michael Bay, but you’re still not ready to do “Hamlet.”

Grade: C