Written by: Ehren Kruger
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Rating: [1/5]
When a lack of a coherent plot, characters worth caring for, and genuinely good comedy does not inhibit a film from making billions on nearly every attempt, we, as an audience, tell studios what we can tolerate. We tell them we can settle for nonsense, which explains the continuance of these films, which completely fell off in the previous film and continues to get even worse in Dark of the Moon.
Now living in New York in his full-time job, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) once again finds himself in the middle of the battle between the Autobots and Decepticons as a group of the latter have nestled themselves on the dark side of the moon. As the Decepticons seek to bring them over to Earth in order to help rid of the Autobots, Optimus Prime tries to put an end to this battle.
The sheer lack of quality to nearly an insulting degree as found in Dark of the Moon did so much to damage my feelings towards these films that this became the last one of them that I would ever see. With Revenge of the Fallen being so putrid, one would hope the team behind this franchise would learn their lesson and try to bring back the charm of the first film that at least came with some sort of coherent story, but they were given all of the reassurance they needed to continue down this path. A particular path where if they show just enough explosions and robots mashing into each other, then nothing really matters. Not plot, not characters, not well-shot sequences, nothing matters and as audience members we rewarded it.
Starting this unfortunate experience begins the wave of revisionist history this franchise loves to employ implicating these robots have always been part of our existence here on Earth and we are just finding out about it now. In this feature, it surrounds how the missions to get to the Moon in the ’60s were not necessarily propelled by competition with the Soviets and American Exceptionalism but rather because there was some weird Transformers-related incident up there the government wanted to discreetly check out. Something quite silly but at least we know where we stand with this feature from the onset.
Then we reconnect with Witwicky, who at this point, feels like such a tired character who needs to be put away. Now in another stage of life with a new girlfriend, for him to continue to be wrapped up in all of this mess just feels cruel at this point. In desperate attempts to make moments emotionally resonant in the feature, Shia LaBeouf decides to just scream for the majority of his scenes, which gets old very quickly to the point where spending time with the robots feels like a reprieve. Something I never thought I would say. They introduce his new girlfriend, Carly Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) who’s simply forgettable. Applying her trade in modeling before this feature and having this film serve as her acting debut did her absolutely no favors with the empty character she receives.
Of the most maddening things the feature elicits comes from its sheer inability to build an entertaining story and then having such an egregiously bloated runtime. For the plot this feature sought to play out through its narrative, everything in this feature feels like it’s just dragging along looking for something interesting to happen. Such maddening decisions get made and this movie feels like an endless chore to sit through. If a film wants to have a runtime of over 150 minutes, it should have some level of reason why, and in no particular minute did Dark of the Moon prove why it needed to keep going.
As Shia La Beouf’s run with these films ended as did mine with Dark of the Moon putting the final nail in the coffin of films that could have promised if even just slightly more effort went into the fundamentals of what makes an enjoyable film. This feature failed to deliver a plot worth watching or human characters to attach to even with a recurring character. However, its biggest crime by far was its sheer lack of entertainment value as it just trudges along through its tired jokes and messy action sequences. Truly a disappointing film, but one we could not be too surprised about considering the feature that preceded it.
Films with Josh 
