Decepticon Job
Transformers:
Dark of the Moon
Directed
by Michael Bay
Runtime:
157 min.
Ten years ago this week saw the premiere of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven
Spielberg’s film about a robot with a soul, and there hasn’t been a better
movie since. Certainly not Transformers:
Dark of the Moon, third in the Michael Bay fantasy series essentially about
rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots (aliens from the planet Cybertron) who come to Earth
and fight over the domination of mankind.
Bay’s ongoing premise—good guy Autobots battle
bad guy Decepticons—isn’t just boyhood army play writ large; it charts the
distance our culture has traveled during the past decade. By avoiding
contemplation about the emotional nature of its clanging, morphing, warring
creatures—or even why the combat is never, ever decisive—Bay and executive
producer Steven Spielberg accommodate the insensitivity that characterizes
post-9/11 culture.
As entertainment, the Transformer movies are both coarsening and defensive—especially
when we watch American teenager Sam Witwicky (obnoxious Shia LaBeouf) play
mascot to the metal behemoths for a third time without his learning anything
new. Sam romps with a new girlfriend—this time a pillow-lipped British blonde
named Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley standing in for the irreplaceable Megan
Fox) and spars with a CIA operative (Frances McDormand) while dodging bullets,
explosions and crumbling architecture.
Sam is not a human version of A.I.’s heartbreaking robot David (Haley Joel Osment); neither are the
meant-to-be-comical but confusingly interchangeable Transformers: heroic
Optimus Prime and Megatron and villainous Sentinel Prime. Their changeable
metal body parts yet single-minded characteristics resemble the personalities
of pets; they’re unsurprising, doing the same old morph-choreography and no
longer an emanation of human will as the first two films amusingly suggested.
Instead, Dark of the Moon uses these
noisy Transformers to indicate our nervous disregard of soulfulness. The
persistent emphasis on war derives from the shock and terror of 9/11 more than
it does from the playful metamorphoses of the Hasbro’s original toys.
And yet, Transformers
stubbornly remains a boy’s thing: IMAX-scale figures combining destruction
and reconstruction. Bay rivals Sam Peckinpah’s compositional gifts, but the
unexamined violence is offered as primal acts of mindless leisure. This is a
pathetic development of what should have been A.I.’s humanist legacy
except that early aughts culture-arbiters never took up the moral significance
in Spielberg’s exploration of man’s destiny. (Gregory Solman’s essential essay
on A.I. was turned down by a New York
film publication and only published by the Australian website Senses of Cinema.) David’s
Pinocchio-like quest to become a real boy was actually a parable about faith
and childhood: A robot child launched into the vast future was all the final
remnant of human consciousness. Spielberg took what could have been a
nihilistic Kubrickian speculation and up-ended it; finding the wonderment of
spirituality and memory invested in machinery.
Now David—the totem of longing, love and
faith—is rebutted by the Transformers’ violent technology (they never morph
into anything fun). A profound idea gets vitiated by Bay and Spielberg’s
infernal machines (and fanboys’ blind devotion to consumerism). My
disappointment in Dark of the Moon is
complicated since it is clearly a film of enormous—if limited—imagination. Its
cultural impact denies the sensitivity of A.I.’s endeavor by promising stimulation
rather than insight. Since A.I.’s gentle cerebration was never popular
enough to counter the demoralization of 9/11, thoughtless cinematic forms
prevailed—along with a panic-stricken relationship to technology that this
series virtually celebrates.
Bay’s knack for extravagant gadgetry, grandiose
violence and hyperbolic panoramas produces images well worth their exorbitant
budgets but it comes at an awful intellectual cost. Instead of looking toward
man’s future, Bay trivializes the past and present. Dark of the Moon traduces the U.S.-Russian space race, the 1969
moonwalk and the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown no differently than Bay trivialized
WWII in Pearl Harbor. This time, his
indifference to history shows in the trite estimation of historical figures
(John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Buzz Aldrin) who represent human struggle. It’s
pretext for rationalizing outer space conspiracies and threat that wind up
looking just like Bay’s nonsensical Armageddon.
Retro scenes parody Oliver Stone’s JFK and
the long slog though Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger’s inane ideas of sex
farce and family comedy confirm an arrogant, two-plus hour indifference to
contoured storytelling—all to set up about 15 minutes of Pow!
Regrettably, the poetry of Transformers 2—it presciently translated post-9/11 Mid-East fears
to the surrealistic vandalism of its Pyramid sequences—is lost. (Here Sentinel
Prime simply commands: “Around the world, [nuclear] pillars arise!”). Now,
there’s no poetry; just idiotic, unintelligible machine combat. While it easily
out-astonishes Chris Nolan’s glum Inception,
it defames the action-movie tradition and embarrasses the talent that makes Bay
a great filmmaker.
Distinction must be made: The previous Transformer movies seemed perfect
vehicles for Bay’s action skills and penchant for exultant scenes of blooming,
zooming chaos. Numb to dialogue, with an adman’s sense of reality, Bay yet
exhibits absolute visual wit. His compositions and sense of dynamism relate—no
joke—to the Futurist art movement that influenced the cinematic advances of the
silent era.
In the 1910 Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Painting, signed by Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla
and Severini, the Futurists virtually predicted Bay’s Transformers when they proclaimed: “Our renovated consciousness
does not permit us to look upon man as the center of universal life. The
suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an
electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heartrending
expression of color…The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be
whispered. We wish them in future to sing and re-echo upon our canvases in
deafening and triumphant flourishes.”
The Pow! moments in Dark of the Moon are exactly like that. The climactic battle in
Chicago contains crosshatch vectors of sci-fi action that recall Boccioni’s
paintings The City Rises (1910) and The Street Enters the House (1911) as well
as the Manifesto’s “persistent symbols of universal
vibration…the motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes and in their
turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.”
Think of that when you see a Deception named Soundwave/Shockwave grind through
Chicago like a destructive earthworm. Bay’s image of a skyscraper squeezed by a
serpentine turbine is, frankly, a marvel. To watch the solid structure bend and
fold over evokes the 9/11 WTC nightmare: pure Hollywood Capitalist defiance.
It’s a Pop Art thing that shouldn’t be mistaken for a summer blockbuster thing.
Bay’s fantasy of mankind’s upheaval is certainly
about dynamism, yet not much else. (Would the Futurists approve of such
decadence?) Still, critics and fanboys should demand more—that he dig deeper.
The smallest narrative link between Chicago’s decimation and a single
character’s caring about it would make this sequence magnificent, not just
spectacular. (A curious line of dialogue describing “a visual and therefore
visceral betrayal” is oddly apt.) Scenes where robots destroy cities apparently
uninhabited by people—a bloodless Armageddon—either
excavates Chicago’s secret moral corruption (perhaps a timely private fantasy
of Rod Blagojevich?) or else is just another tentpole time-killer, as stupid as
Inception or Avatar.
A.I.’s robot child poetically embodied that precious virtue of caring. He
personified love that existed throughout time and reified the purpose of
narrative, the meaning of art. Spielberg took the Futurists’
anti-sentimentality back to the future. In Dark
of the Moon, Bay’s machines mean nothing. Because the Transformers movies
have come to reflect none of A.I.’s significance, Bay’s technical marvel is
an artistic failure—for anyone who cares about that kind of thing.
Read Armond White’s reviews of Transformers movies & A.I.: