Fridae

For better or for worse, Michael Bay has put his mark on the Transformers franchise. Instead of thinking “robots in disguise”, we associate the feature film series with silly explosions, scrap metal and debris flying all over the place, all orchestrated to loud music or the combined fury of detonating bullets and other ammunition. And those are the good bits of the franchise!

In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Autobots and Decepticons war again over yet another artifact of power, which this time will teleport Cybertron to Earth, steal our resources and minerals, and enslave humanity. You think you’ve seen this before? You might have. This is “The Ultimate Doom” storyline from the original animated series.

To be sure, we don’t expect Michael Bay and his writers to match the thoughtful and imaginative writing from the animated series. You sort of gather that from the script, which hurries us from one plot point to another; and the dialogue, which is clunky and banal as ever, turning human characters into exposition machines, and giant robots into boring, hectoring nannies.

For his third outing with these toys for boys, Michael Bay surprisingly tops himself. His camera perpetually oggles at Huntington-Whitley’s figure. Comic relief comes in the form of hilarious performances by John Malkovich, Ken Jeong (stealing the movie in a washroom stall encounter with Sam Witwicky that threatens to go into Sex and Zen 3D territory), and John Turturo. While you may roll your eyes at the “funny accents comedy routine” involving minor Autobot characters, Leonard Nimoy’s voice acting (in the role of Sentinel Prime) adds an entire layer of emotional maturity to every scene he appears in.

Most importantly, the action sequences this time round are actually comprehensible instead of being a kinetic mess. It is solely on the strength of the action sequences that makes Dark of the Moon the most credible and enjoyable entry in Bay’s Transformers trilogy.