Transformers: Dark of the Moon addresses some of Revenge of the Fallen's most significant structural problems while retaining enough of its predecessor's worst habits to prevent it from being a return to the original's relative quality. Michael Bay's 2011 film has a more coherent narrative than its immediate predecessor, a stronger final act, and a more credible human antagonist. It is a picture that demonstrates the difference between improvement and recovery.
At a Glance
Director: Michael Bay
Runtime: 154 minutes
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Patrick Dempsey
Release: 2011
Critics Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, a partial recovery with a stronger final act)
Audience Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, an improvement on Revenge of the Fallen)
Plot
The picture reveals that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was secretly motivated by the discovery of a crashed Cybertronian spacecraft, and that the space race was driven by the American government's desire to reach it before the Soviets. The Decepticons, working through a human collaborator, plan to use technology recovered from the wreck to transport Cybertron to Earth's orbit, enslaving humanity to rebuild their home planet. The screenplay by Ehren Kruger is more coherent than Revenge of the Fallen's, and the moon landing conspiracy premise gives the film a historical dimension that the franchise had not previously attempted. The Chicago climax, in which the Decepticons occupy the city and the Autobots and their human allies mount a counterattack, is the franchise's most sustained action sequence and its most geographically legible. The moon landing hook is the Bayverse's most promising narrative device, connecting the franchise's mythology to a real historical event with enough specificity to give the film a grounding that the more abstract mythologies of the other sequels lack. That the screenplay does not develop this premise beyond its function as a setup for the Chicago battle is the picture's most significant missed opportunity, and the gap between what the conspiracy angle could have been and what it actually is remains the clearest measure of the franchise's consistent underachievement.
Characters
The replacement of Megan Fox with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Sam's love interest is the most discussed casting change, and Huntington-Whiteley's performance, while limited by a screenplay that gives her character even less function than Fox's Mikaela, is not the liability that the critical consensus suggested. She brings a physical poise to the role that suits the film's more serious register, and her scenes in the Chicago sequences have an urgency that the character's earlier passages do not prepare the audience for. Patrick Dempsey's Dylan Gould is the franchise's most effective human antagonist, a collaborator whose motivations are developed with enough specificity to give him a function beyond simple villainy. His pragmatic calculation, the sense that he has made a rational assessment of which side will win and acted accordingly, gives the character a moral complexity that the Bayverse's other human antagonists entirely lack. LaBeouf's Sam is given a post-college storyline that generates neither the comic energy of the first film nor the stakes that the mythology's escalation requires, his character's arc having reached a point where the screenplay has no clear sense of where to take him. John Malkovich's eccentric employer is the most enjoyably absurd human addition, and his scenes with LaBeouf have a comic energy that the more serious passages lack. Frances McDormand's government official is the most credible human authority figure, and her eventual alliance with the Autobots is handled with enough pragmatic intelligence to make it feel like a character decision rather than a plot convenience.
Meaning / Themes
The moon landing conspiracy gives the picture a historical dimension that the franchise had not previously attempted, and the suggestion that humanity's greatest achievement was motivated by alien technology rather than human ingenuity has a satirical potential that the film does not develop. The central argument, that collaboration with the enemy is always ultimately self-defeating, is handled with enough specificity in Dempsey's character to give it a modest thematic dimension, but the franchise's fundamental indifference to ideas beyond its action potential prevents it from being developed with any consistency. The picture's most pointed observation, that the space race was driven by fear and competition rather than by the spirit of exploration its mythology celebrates, is made in passing and then abandoned.
Direction
Bay pitches the picture at a register of sustained action spectacle rather than the comic lightness of the original or the relentless excess of Revenge of the Fallen, a tonal choice that gives the Chicago climax a weight but that also removes the moments of human warmth that gave the first film its most effective passages. The opening two acts are the franchise's most inert, establishing the moon landing conspiracy and Sam's post-college situation with a patience that the material's content does not justify. The tonal shift between the sluggish setup and the city's occupation and counterattack is the most abrupt in the franchise, and the contrast between the two halves underlines how much more effective the picture might have been if the earlier sequences had been edited with the same urgency as the climax.
Bay's direction reaches its most technically disciplined in the Chicago climax, a sustained action sequence of visual invention and dramatic coherence that demonstrates what the franchise's ambitions can achieve when the action is given enough context to be meaningful. The wingsuit sequence, in which human soldiers glide through the occupied city's skyscrapers, is the franchise's most purely exhilarating passage, and the building collapse sequence is staged with a physical specificity that gives the danger a visceral quality absent from the more chaotic sequences of the earlier films. The contrast between the climax's spatial intelligence and the opening acts' visual incoherence is the most instructive measure of what Bay's direction can achieve when the material gives it a clear objective. Jablonsky's score develops the franchise's musical identity with a darker and more urgent register that suits the Chicago sequences' more serious ambitions.
Dark of the Moon received mixed reviews on its release and was a major commercial success, grossing over $1.12 billion worldwide to become the franchise's highest-grossing Bayverse entry. Critics acknowledged the improved narrative coherence and the climax's spectacle while noting the sluggish opening acts and the franchise's continued indifference to its possibilities. It is now regarded as the Bayverse's most commercially successful and most technically polished entry, a picture whose Chicago climax is consistently cited as the franchise's finest action sequence and whose opening acts are equally cited as evidence of the series' persistent structural failures.
Final Verdict: An uneven step forward from the franchise's nadir, with a more coherent narrative, a stronger human antagonist, and a Chicago climax that is the Bayverse's most disciplined action sequence. Its opening acts are the franchise's most sluggish, and its fundamental indifference to the possibilities of its own premise remains the series' most persistent creative limitation. It is a better film than Revenge of the Fallen, which is a more modest achievement than it sounds, and its Chicago climax is a reminder that Bay's direction, given sufficient clarity and a coherent dramatic objective, can produce something worth watching.