Transformers: Dark of the Moon | Michael Bay Makes the Prettiest Spectacles

God damn it, Michael Bay.

You just had to go and make good on your promises of more of the 'good' stuff from Transformers 2 and less of the annoying, overtly racist ball-jokes. Rosie Huntington-Whitely manages to be the hot, damsel-in-distress stereotype Bay always wanted Megan Fox to be, but without all that problematic "I can take care of myself, women are real people, you know" crap. And yes, she does end up looking pretty hot most of the time, even if she looks like a French bull dog.

As a Brit, she's probably more upset that I called her a Frenchie.

I already know I probably have to buy this movie on Blu-Ray when it comes out. I'm even tempted to go back and buy your last travesty just for the coherent narrative, but I think I've got a compromise worked out.

When I read a certain XKCD comic, I sold off my latter two Matrix movies (Matrices?), and assure myself that there was a single great movie with no sequels. After Revenge of the Fallen, I decided to wait and see how awful the third one would be, because as those never-real movies had taught me, the second film's credibility is more dependent on what it leads into than where it came from.

And damn you, you did it. You made a better sequel and actually seem to have learned something from your own mistakes and made the best fanboy summer spectacle you could. It's a visual orgy of scrap metal with a soundtrack that could have been scored by the guy who did The Dark Knight. (Actually it was Steve Joblonsky, but he's worked on Transformers before, plus quite a few high-caliber films and a ton of horror/suspense.)

So here's the deal: I am probably going to own you on disc, Dark Side. I am going to own you, and I am going to put you next to Transformers 1, but I am going to stick a Post-It note on your cover, and that Post-It will have written on it all the little details carried over from Movie 2 and I'll pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.

• A few other Autobots came to Earth.
• Megatron was revived but got his ass handed to him again, and he hurts.
• Sam has a couple of pet mini-bots now.

DONE.

Now I can be happy and watch my giant robots kill each other and not worry about bonehead plot lines or pandering, lowest-common-denominator stereotypes. This movie really just has a trio of British rugby hooligans and a Ferrari that might have been French for some reason.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit fuck fuck shit fuck ass shiiiiiiii-

Actually, that digression comes back to where I wanted to end up anyway:

I will NOT be posting any important spoilers today. For once, and I can't believe I'm typing these words, this is a Michael Bay movie you really need to see.

Some fun things to look for, though:

• At one point, I'm pretty sure Bumblebee gets punched in the robo-junk.
• WE TOTALLY GET TO SEE OPTIMUS' TRAILER DO SOMETHING!
• Another half-dozen B+ List comedians and relatively serious actors making cameos, including Alan "Wash" Tudyk!
• Three different U.S. President impersonators.
• Some of the Decepticon invasion scenes you glimpse in the trailers are pretty intense. I think the whole movie was actually trying to make up for the lack of any human fatalities in the original cartoon. And I think they do it. Lot of implied death with explosions. At least one guy gets shot by a giant bullet unprotected, and there's one shot with a disintegrator ray gun thing that evokes a pretty iconic scene from the Terminator franchise.
• Leonard Nemoy voices a central character, and shares scenes with Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime. The two previously worked together voicing Optimus and Megatron's rebuilt persona "Galvatron" in the original 1985 Transformers: The Movie. (Which incidentally took place in 2005.) Daniel Riordan, Megatron's original voice actor, provided lungs for Bay's series' Starscream. To hear them each interact at various points is wonderful.
• The next Twilight movie had a preview, probably for all the sexy ladies who got dragged to the theater by their explosionally-aroused boyfriends.

All-in-all, it was a great time. It is three hours long, so make sure you pee just beforehand. Some of the people in my theater also found other ways to amuse themselves; one group of kids entered the theater reeking of weed, so they were going for the "pretty lights in 3D while stoned" approach, and I cannot in any way fault their logic. I bet the movie was even more magical for them than it was for me.

I also found an opened Lifestyles condom wrapper outside the other theater on my way out, so I imagine somebody had the wonderful experience of actually making love to a Transformers movie. That nerd just had the fucking night of his life. Peter Cullen's voice is just so sensuous.

Just wish he'd splurged for a Trojan. We don't need any more little Decepticons running around.