Transformers 3

The best car ad ever made?

Transformers 3 benefited from the fact that it couldn’t possibly be worse than Transformers 2. And it wasn’t. Ish. The downfall of Transformers 2 was the lack of any real coherent plot. “We tried to do too many things in the second movie, which didn’t give enough time in any one of them. We were constantly jumping to the next piece of information, the next place.” Unfortunately for Michael Bay he seems to have made the same mistakes again.

But before the bad let’s start with the good! Um… Well first and foremost the film starts off well. The notion of the moon landing being a con to go and have a sneaky peak at a transformer crash site was a nice touch and sets a decent tone to the film. The sheer scale of the ship, and the details of how it come to crash on the moon, are key indicators that the film is going to go one step further with it’s battle scenes. Visually impressive, the fight sequences are definitely an improvement in the franchise. Gone is the shaky cam close-up (thanks to 3D for that one), which means the audience get to keep their lunch down. And, also, that Megan Fox mark II chick, she is pretty to look at isn’t she?

However, like Rosie Huntington Whiteley (Megan Fox mark II), the appeal of the film only lies in the aesthetics, there ain’t much under the hood. The Hasbro series has a strong enough cast to keep the audience interested but sometimes the film’s discrepancies become too much. There’s only so much that Ferrari-bot, Impala-bot and the little munchkin-bots (why do they have hair?!) can cover up before I start to get suspicious. Oh well, at least they replaced the racist ghetto-bots with a ‘Scot-bot’.

Maybe Mr Bay was too busy counting Chevrolet’s cash that he forgot to finish some narrative sequences? Would explain a lot. “We need to lower that bridge!” – They don’t lower the bridge. The bridge is never mentioned again. You could drive Optimus through some of the plot holes. And it’s not just the plot holes, it’s the haphazard editing in the scenes that do make sense. There is never any clear notion of space or time. In one of the fight scenes (well one part of the fight scene) Optimus Prime seems to come from nowhere and all I could think was ‘why weren’t you here earlier?!’  The constant incoherence is frustrating and underlies a recurring laziness in Bay’s direction. One critic referred to TF3 as merely ‘Bay masturbating on screen’, a fair comment, but masturbation would at least suggest a hint of reality, which doesn’t tally up with the film.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film, it was as loud and bashful as Bumblebee’s bonnet, but it has still failed, yet again, to meet the expectations set by the first film. There are too many gimmicks, too many plot holes and too little closure to call it a good film. It is just another summer blockbuster. Iceberg.