When Michael Bay met Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the improbably tall and blank star of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” on the set of a Victoria’s Secret commercial shoot, he did not introduce himself, or bother to ask her name. What he said instead was: “Can you walk?” She said yes, according to a recent oral history in GQ, at which point she was promptly driven out into the desert wearing only high heels, underwear, and a black cape, pushed out of the car and abandoned, and left to make the long, punishing trek back to Bay’s waiting camera.
As it turned out, she could indeed walk — in heels and in flats, and in “Dark of the Moon,” she wears both, often in the same scene. Bay is almost as famous for his continuity errors as he is for his explosions, and there is a hypnotic quality, watching Huntington-Whiteley’s footwear change from shot to shot, depending on whether she’s running, or sliding down the side of a building, or inexplicably astride a car, her long legs filmed, as always, from somewhere far down below.
The errors are a rare glimpse of humanity in a movie that has almost none, and a viewer might find him- or herself clinging to it like a talisman, evidence that even sadists like Bay will allow his lead actress to flee imaginary robots in something less punishing than stilettos. Considering Huntington-Whiteley’s character arc otherwise consists of having her “sensual” curves compared by Patrick Dempsey to those of a car; suffering the advances of a many-tentacled robot straight out of Japanese animated rape porn; and being the victim of co-star Shia LeBeouf’s meta-Megan Fox joke — “She dumped me,” he tells the actress who plays his mother, so “I moved onto something better”— this is a kindness not otherwise shown to the movie’s lone woman under 50.
Then again, there is more than enough pity and shame to go around in this third “Transformers” installment. The plot of “Dark of the Moon,” if there can be said to be one, involves a bit of revisionist history — nothing big, just a restaging of the Apollo landing on the moon, CGI cameos from both JFK and Barack Obama, the near-complete destruction of the city of Chicago, and a robot civil war. The astronaut Buzz Aldrin shows up to genuflect to a green screen — er, Optimus Prime. “From a fellow space traveler, it’s a true honor,” he says to Prime, leader of the Autobots, who are the good machines, except when they are forcing American heroes to acknowledge tractor trailers and muscle cars as their historical equals.
The bad machines are the Decepticons, first seen hanging out somewhere on the African veldt, engineering a spectacular betrayal that involves interstellar space pillars that “transport matter through time and space” and a bladed, coruscating robot worm that will later wrap itself around Chicago’s Hotel 71. Trembling between them and their dastardly aims is LeBeouf, whose primary acting inspiration here seems to have been cocaine, and an assemblage of Autobots that includes LeBeouf’s best friend and part-time chauffeur, Bumblebee, a bright yellow Chevy Camaro who speaks only via playback of various quotes from old movies, television and the AM dial.
Bumblebee is in many ways the perfect avatar for Bay and his screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who together clearly view cinema less as a storytelling medium than as a contest as to who can stage the most impressive 3-D action sequence in as few words as possible. Kruger shamelessly pillages dialogue from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and the land of cliché (“Today, in the name of freedom, we take the battle to them!”) — when he’s not giving up entirely and putting it in quotation marks. As one character tells another after they’ve successfully lowered a bridge, or blown up a missile, or whatever: “Pleasure working with you, Seymour ... I believe you’re supposed to say.”
But oh, the 3-D action sequences. “Dark of the Moon” begins with a delicate latticework of ordinance taking out an Autobot ship and a vividly staged moonwalk; later, Bay’s camera will sprint down a freeway alongside a fleet of robots morphing in and out of car form, and follow a platoon of men plummeting from a plane equipped only with BASE jumping gear, their nubby wings spread like so many death-defying flying squirrels. The rubble-filled contours of a bombed-out Chicago and the elaborate choreography Bay stages around the city’s landmark 35 East Wacker Drive skyscraper create an unfamiliar and bracing sense of space and dimension onscreen. Too bad it’s all in the service of an oedipal struggle between two interchangeable blurs of computer animation.
We might salute John Malkovich, John Turturro and the immortal Frances McDormand, playing various government officials and parental figures to LeBeouf’s Sam Witwicky (not to be confused with Kevin Dunn and Julie White, doing their best Randy and Evi Quaid impressions as Witwicky’s actual parents.) The adults’ over-the-top impersonations of crazy people — because who else would be caught dead in a Michael Bay film? — are at least amusing and unexpected. The same can’t be said for Ken Jeong’s Jerry Wang, who delivers evidence of a Decepticon plot to Witwicky while straddling him in a bathroom stall, and who may as well have been named Long Duk Dong.
Bay, who has directed some of the best American action films in the last two decades, is not the enemy, really. But his misanthropy and misogyny do not scale well. The bigger his movies get, the more cruel and inhumane they become, and we are left like Huntington-Whiteley, abducted, driven out onto the salt flats, and forced to march our way back under the unsympathetic eye of a director who has seemingly forgotten his camera is beholding a human.
As it turned out, she could indeed walk — in heels and in flats, and in “Dark of the Moon,” she wears both, often in the same scene. Bay is almost as famous for his continuity errors as he is for his explosions, and there is a hypnotic quality, watching Huntington-Whiteley’s footwear change from shot to shot, depending on whether she’s running, or sliding down the side of a building, or inexplicably astride a car, her long legs filmed, as always, from somewhere far down below.
The errors are a rare glimpse of humanity in a movie that has almost none, and a viewer might find him- or herself clinging to it like a talisman, evidence that even sadists like Bay will allow his lead actress to flee imaginary robots in something less punishing than stilettos. Considering Huntington-Whiteley’s character arc otherwise consists of having her “sensual” curves compared by Patrick Dempsey to those of a car; suffering the advances of a many-tentacled robot straight out of Japanese animated rape porn; and being the victim of co-star Shia LeBeouf’s meta-Megan Fox joke — “She dumped me,” he tells the actress who plays his mother, so “I moved onto something better”— this is a kindness not otherwise shown to the movie’s lone woman under 50.
Then again, there is more than enough pity and shame to go around in this third “Transformers” installment. The plot of “Dark of the Moon,” if there can be said to be one, involves a bit of revisionist history — nothing big, just a restaging of the Apollo landing on the moon, CGI cameos from both JFK and Barack Obama, the near-complete destruction of the city of Chicago, and a robot civil war. The astronaut Buzz Aldrin shows up to genuflect to a green screen — er, Optimus Prime. “From a fellow space traveler, it’s a true honor,” he says to Prime, leader of the Autobots, who are the good machines, except when they are forcing American heroes to acknowledge tractor trailers and muscle cars as their historical equals.
The bad machines are the Decepticons, first seen hanging out somewhere on the African veldt, engineering a spectacular betrayal that involves interstellar space pillars that “transport matter through time and space” and a bladed, coruscating robot worm that will later wrap itself around Chicago’s Hotel 71. Trembling between them and their dastardly aims is LeBeouf, whose primary acting inspiration here seems to have been cocaine, and an assemblage of Autobots that includes LeBeouf’s best friend and part-time chauffeur, Bumblebee, a bright yellow Chevy Camaro who speaks only via playback of various quotes from old movies, television and the AM dial.
Bumblebee is in many ways the perfect avatar for Bay and his screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who together clearly view cinema less as a storytelling medium than as a contest as to who can stage the most impressive 3-D action sequence in as few words as possible. Kruger shamelessly pillages dialogue from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and the land of cliché (“Today, in the name of freedom, we take the battle to them!”) — when he’s not giving up entirely and putting it in quotation marks. As one character tells another after they’ve successfully lowered a bridge, or blown up a missile, or whatever: “Pleasure working with you, Seymour ... I believe you’re supposed to say.”
But oh, the 3-D action sequences. “Dark of the Moon” begins with a delicate latticework of ordinance taking out an Autobot ship and a vividly staged moonwalk; later, Bay’s camera will sprint down a freeway alongside a fleet of robots morphing in and out of car form, and follow a platoon of men plummeting from a plane equipped only with BASE jumping gear, their nubby wings spread like so many death-defying flying squirrels. The rubble-filled contours of a bombed-out Chicago and the elaborate choreography Bay stages around the city’s landmark 35 East Wacker Drive skyscraper create an unfamiliar and bracing sense of space and dimension onscreen. Too bad it’s all in the service of an oedipal struggle between two interchangeable blurs of computer animation.
We might salute John Malkovich, John Turturro and the immortal Frances McDormand, playing various government officials and parental figures to LeBeouf’s Sam Witwicky (not to be confused with Kevin Dunn and Julie White, doing their best Randy and Evi Quaid impressions as Witwicky’s actual parents.) The adults’ over-the-top impersonations of crazy people — because who else would be caught dead in a Michael Bay film? — are at least amusing and unexpected. The same can’t be said for Ken Jeong’s Jerry Wang, who delivers evidence of a Decepticon plot to Witwicky while straddling him in a bathroom stall, and who may as well have been named Long Duk Dong.
Bay, who has directed some of the best American action films in the last two decades, is not the enemy, really. But his misanthropy and misogyny do not scale well. The bigger his movies get, the more cruel and inhumane they become, and we are left like Huntington-Whiteley, abducted, driven out onto the salt flats, and forced to march our way back under the unsympathetic eye of a director who has seemingly forgotten his camera is beholding a human.
