The Megabots are back! This is the third installment of Michael Bay’s hugely popular giant transforming robots film franchise based on the 80s Japanese toys and later an animated series. This live-action film once again has the autobots waging battle to destroy the evil forces of the decepticons.
The film stars an incredibly whiny Shia LaBeouf back as Sam Witwicky, the autobot’s human ally on earth. For this foray he is joined by the extremely wooden Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as his girlfriend. Megan Fox, the previous hot tag-along girlfriend, having been booted out for some unflattering words said about the director. The rest of the human cast consists of some recurring characters including John Turturro, Josh Duhamel & Tyrese Gibson along with the too-good-to-be-in-this-it’s-embarrassing Frances McDormand & John Malkovich.
The film begins with a sequence set in the 60s where the space race is portrayed as a ruse to investigate a mysterious object which crash-lands on the moon. The object is found to be an alien spacecraft belonging to a race of intelligent robots whereby the astronauts proceed to investigate further and shed some light on this strange world changing discovery leave and never come back.
Switch to present time where after the events of the last film, the autobots are helping the US government blow up terrorists maintain peace on earth. A discovery leads them back to the spacecraft on the moon where a series of revelations, that pretend to make sense, are made and thus making up the major “plot” of this film. This of course doesn’t really matter as it is all an excuse by Bay to set the stage for the mayhem and carnage that follows.
Here is where one-trick-pony director Michael Bay does his thing. This includes but is not limited to incoherent slow-motion action sequences of giant metal collages clashing together in scenes filled with a lot of sound, grandiose and flash and we are all just supposed to sit back and be thankful.
Michael Bay doesn’t seem to realize that he should take his time to build real characters and put them in situations that make sense. In doing this he makes the audience care for them and thus the scenes where they are in peril will be all the more tense, exciting and entertaining. All this is lost on him and the action is reduced to humans running around a bunch of exploding special effects.
Another painfully annoying aspect of the film is the blatant, shameless product placement. Characters on screen do everything but point to a product, look at the camera and smile after plugging Mercedes, Cisco, Lenovo or any one of the numerous brands that get thrown in our faces.
The films biggest flaw is Michael Bay’s inability to seamlessly coordinate & direct the abundant action sequences in the film. There is little to no build up and events happen so fast that the audience is not properly tuned to react to them. One scene in particular introduces the audience to the decepticon shockwave with only mere seconds of build up. Hardly enough time to properly absorb the huge physical scope of the character.
This film is for Michael Bay fans, if you liked the first film you will probably like this one. For those of us who watch films expecting a basic plot that makes sense, good script, real characters and properly choreographed action sequences, Michael Bay doesn’t care about us.