Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Entry updated 22 June 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (2011). DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures in association with Hasbro present a Di Bonaventura Pictures production. Directed by Michael Bay. Written by Ehren Kruger. Cast includes Patrick Dempsey, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Shia LaBoeuf, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Leonard Nimoy (voice) and John Turturro. 154 minutes. Colour, 3D.
As LaBoeuf's character makes the further transition from college to workplace, the Apollo programme is revealed to have been a ruse aimed at investigating a crashed Spaceship on the dark side of the Moon, which proves to have carried Sentinel Prime (Nimoy) with a Matter Transmitter. After duping the US government into exiling the Autobots from Earth, the revived Sentinel proves a traitor and Teleports a Decepticon army of Invasion from the moon, with the ultimate aim of transporting their homeworld Cybertron into our solar system and enslaving humanity as forced labour.
Nonsenses of lunar geography and planetary physics are the least of the flaws in this wildest, and highest-grossing, entry in the Mecha/Military SF franchise, with its final hour essentially restaging the hard-fought desert advance of its predecessor Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) in a downtown Chicago trashed by giant Robots in 3D. Secret histories of the Moon landings and Chernobyl are woven into a generation-spanning conspiracy reaching back to the beginning of the Toy franchise, and the planet-busting climax offers grandeur on a scale unattempted by its predecessors, but the exploration of male adolescent desire is wearing thin and the recurrent cast would be rotated out of their duties for the fourth instalment due in 2014. The novelization is Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) by Peter David. [NL]
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