The movie begins featuring an alien ship called the Ark crashing on the moon and sparking the space race.
After the universally-scorned “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Bay recovered nicely, cutting a lot of the needless and forced humor and focusing on the robots, the stars of the show.
Several years have passed since Revenge of the Fallen ended and we find our hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) living in Wasington, D.C. with his new bombshell supermodel girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) and struggling to find a job. Sam’s Autobot guardian Bumblebee has left him to rejoin the rest of his kind, who now work for the government.
Meanwhile, Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and NEST, the human unit led by Lt. Col. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) travel to Russia and investigate Chernobyl, where Prime discovers a piece of the Ark, which apparently caused the meltdown in the power plant when humans tried to harness its power.
Enraged that the humans never informed him about the Ark, Optimus travels to the moon and discovers within the wreck the deactivated body of Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy), the previous Autobot leader, along with five pillars that were Sentinel’s key to ending the war. Optimus brings Sentinel back to Earth and revives him just as Sam forces his way back into the picture, getting the plot in motion.
Once Sam learns the Decepticons have stockpiled hundreds of pillars and left Sentinel for the Autobots to find, things escalate quickly. In an unexpected twist, one of the Autobots turns on his own and allies with the Decepticons.
At two hours and 34 minutes, Dark of the Moon is a long movie, and it doesn’t help that it takes nearly an hour to get the meat of the story moving. And as with almost every other Michael Bay movie, there are a ton of plot holes, but again, this isn’t supposed to be a movie that contends for Best Screenplay.
There were several scenes in the film that were visually stunning, like the Decepticon’s nighttime assault on Chicago, or the Driller, a giant robot worm, attacking a glass skyscraper. But in my opinion, the best scene in the whole movie was a highway chase that occurs about halfway through the movie. In the previous films, it was sometimes hard to tell which robot was which, but that problem seems to have been solved for DOTM, featuring plenty of close-ups and distinguishable characters, even in the massive final battle.
These aren’t your older brother’s Transformers, however.
The Decepticon attacks in Washington and Chicago featured humans being blasted into clouds of ash and a nice close-up of a human skull rolling to stop in the middle of the screen. When the Autobots make their entrance into Chicago, Optimus shoots down a Decepticon jet
and coldly states, “We will kill them all,” before ordering the Wreckers, a team of three heavily armed NASCARs, to finish off the pilot, which they do by ripping the robot limb from limb.
DOTM ranks just behind the first Transformers film, only for its lack of pacing in the first hour, but overall the film is visually spectacular and worth the price of admission if you’re just looking for some summer entertainment.
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