Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011)

If there is any sliver of decency in this universe, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third entry in the most crass, vile and offensive big-budget franchise in Hollywood history will be its last. If it is any better than the series' previous installment, that is only because it sublimates its racial, gender, political and aesthetic travesties into an even longer, more interminable celebration of reactionary ideals. For a series predicated on the idea that some things are more than meets the eye, the Transformers movies represent one of the least varied, consistently shallow sagas to ever hit the big screen: Transformers 3, like its predecessors, is a masturbatory affair, perhaps even more so than the execrable Revenge of the Fallen. Whatever shred of humanity existed in these films is obliterated, leaving only an unadulterated tribute to He-Man masculinity in response to hysterical conservative perceptions of the Obama era.

Sam (Shia LaBeouf, whose increasingly greasy look in each film he does suggests he hasn't showered since Even Stevens got canceled) saved the world and brokered an alliance between man and Autobot, but no one will give him a job out of Ivy League college. The poor guy has to settle for an absurdly large D.C. apartment and being supported by his disposable new girlfriend, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), whose car-collecting boss, Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), openly flirts with her in front of Sam, further emasculating our hero. Compounded by the American government having locked Sam out from communicating with the Autobots, he needs a complete world invasion of Decepticons to let him prove his manhood, raising the question of just how many people need to die for Shia LaBeouf to feel comfortable about his dick size.

The film opens with the most crass, avaricious distortion of historical footage since Forrest Gump to turn the moon landing, a genuinely awe-inspiring event that continues to provoke wonder and human pride today, into a front for investigating a spaceship crash. Turns out, Prime's predecessor, Sentinel, crash-landed on the Moon 40 years ago, carrying with him an important weapon that would have decided the Civil War on Cybertron. Now, the Autobots must retrieve the deactivated Sentinel Prime and the device before Decepticons discover the ship.

That's all the plot background you need, really. However, those who continue to absolve Bay as someone who caters to experience over story sure are ignoring the endless pile-ons of narrative threads and convolutions that affect all the Transformers films but this 155-minute slog most of all. Dark of the Moon is really no different from its predecessor, only bigger. But that increase is all proportional, so while the climactic war for Earth might be on a larger scale than what came before it, it takes up about the same percentage of screen time.

Ergo, we get more individualist hokum as all government officials are yet again portrayed as feckless, spineless bureaucrats holding back Sam and the Autobots from getting the job done. We also have to sit through Sam's usual relationship drama, albeit this time with a character simply dropped into the franchise and given no development; Bay's idea of character establishment for Carly is a tracking shot closed in on H-W's ass as she walks up a staircase to greet Sam. And we also get endless exposition, told-not-shown mythology for a bunch of goddamn toys that eats up at good hour and a half of the 2.5-hour movie.

Bay might have subtracted some of the more onerous aspects of Revenge of the Fallen, but he's only found all-new ways to make the same dumb movie. Bay frames so many shots from low angles that after a certain point it seems less an affectation to stress the heroic properties of the Autobots and Americans than the result of getting rid of the tripod for budget reasons. The 3D looks good but is still nothing more than an add-on, and one can only make out snippets of stereoscopic depth because of the usual editing and compositional clumsiness. In fairness, Bay does lengthen the shots, though it seems the average shot length of his action moments has gone from .8 seconds to one whole second. (An integer? Oh, Mr. Bay, you spoil us with your 24 frames!) And when a shot is held for one of a seemingly unending series of slo-mo shots, the constantly moving parts of incoherently smashed together Transformers turn what are meant to be moments of gasp-inducing wonder into headache-causing confusion. ILM had their job cut out for them with Tranformers, animating hundreds of moving parts on each robot, but I've come to regard their work as something similar to overzealous scientists in outbreak movies: they were all so eager to see if they could make something so frame-collapsingly complicated that they never bother to ask if they should.

Even by Bay's standards, the disregard for acting here is horrific. Huntington-Whiteley makes Megan Fox look like Meryl Streep: she says her lines as if reading cue cards without her contacts in. I'm worried about sounding paternalistic here, but frankly, this isn't her fault. She has no experience and no charisma, but that's what Bay wanted, and it's not like she has much of worth to say anyway. Bay met her while shooting Victoria's Secret commercials, and this may be the first case where more was demanded from her for a lingerie shoot than acting in a big-budget film: the women in Axe Body Spray commercials have more meaningful lines than Huntington-Whiteley does here. Saying she should have known she was just there to be hot and to get suitably dirtied up is akin to saying she was "asking for it," and at this point I feel sorry for anyone who has to work with both Bay and LaBeouf.

Besides, why pick on her when she appears in a film with a whole host of people who ought to know better? Frances McDormand and John Malkovich join fellow Coens alum John Turturro, who unfortunately returns once more to speed-talk his way through pompous, histrionic lines. Malkovich coasts on autopilot, taking off from his forcefully smug condescension to reach a cruising altitude at manically infatuated with robots. McDormand's performance is better, but she fares worse for being the bureaucratic punching-bag who keeps a leash around the Transformers' wrecking-ball testicles until she realizes that she should have let them run rampant after all. Ken Jeong appears to add another Asian stereotype to his C.V., also hinting at aggressive homosexuality for a couple more yuks. The best actor here is Buzz Aldrin, brought out of retirement to excuse Bay's tacky appropriation of one of the true feats of American exceptionalism. Aldrin, a true American hero who has experienced the true awe of space travel and exploring the unknown, has to paint a look of overwhelmed reverence on his face to talk to a pocket of air to later be filled in by an unimaginatively humanoid alien. Now that is a performance.

And so, Dark of the Moon is another arduous foray up Bay's vas deferens, a wantonly destructive paean to distorted, boot-in-your-ass American shit-kickerism. Autobots never fight more than 50 yards away from a American flag billowing behind them, and they even seem content to kill Arabs for Uncle Sam. Hell, Megatron, who keeps coming back from total annihilation because the source material has a dearth of other standout villains, even wanders around the desert wearing a cowl over his half-destroyed, almost leprotic face like an Arab terrorist organizing a sleeper strike. And finally, we have Sentinel Prime, the revived Autobot leader who clearly becomes an Obama stand-in, surrendering to our enemies. Of course, the only group to whom Obama has actually capitulated are Republicans, but Bay paints Sentinel as a weak appeaser letting terrorists come in and destroy the world just so he can say he brokered a deal for the greater good.

Bay loves a good apocalypse under Democratic presidents, forcibly tearing apart any liberal globalism so America alone can triumph in the end and prove reactionary politics the only true virtue. Of course, in real life, America flourished in peacetime under Clinton and Obama had bin Laden shot in the face, while Bay has done nothing more than make obscenely expensive, morally bankrupt commercials for General Motors. So let me modify an earlier statement with its obvious true meaning: the human race does not face extinction so Sam Witwicky can feel better about his masculinity but so Michael Bay can feel like a big man. Like Bill O'Reilly, who appears in the film, Bay is loud, obnoxious, and posturing; he uses the achievements of others to promote his own cult of personality and disguise how little individual might he truly demonstrates. In a sense, Dark of the Moon stands as Bay's masterpiece, the auterist statement to make irrelevant the idea of auterism as the predominant measuring stick for film as an art form. It is the Tree of Life of shit, a career-summarizing monument that definitively proves Michael Bay is not merely an awful director but a repugnant human being.



Addendum 6/30: The more I think about this film, the more I find it incredibly disturbing that the carnage of the final act, in which Chicago (incidentally Barack Obama's home turf) is ripped apart by Decepticons in the absence of Autobots, who essentially hide to teach humans a lesson about not respecting them. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people die, just so we'll appreciate our robo-allies. That is profoundly messed up.

Unstoppable

As I've yet to track down a copy of Déjà Vu on Blu-Ray and would prefer to stick solely to that film's considerable merits, I figure I might as well use Unstoppable as an excuse to make a somewhat shameful cinephile confession: I adore Tony Scott. Not his early, more commercially friendly material, mind you, but the increasing chaos of his second-stage work. His work in the new millennium has placed him in the nebulous, bizarre realm between the gauche incoherence of Michael Bay and the sensualist poetry of Wong Kar-wai. Yes, I said it.

Yet where Bay contents himself to roll around in incompetence, stringing together half-narratives out of weightless ultimatums (there's an asteroid! No more questions!), rapid edits designed to mask the formlessness of his shots and a sickening gauze slopped over the whole proceedings -- to say nothing of his cocktail of racial stereotypes and light misogyny -- Scott's films are more tactile and resonant. Though his narratives of late have been just as abstract as Bay's, Scott infuses his films with a focus on emotion, his own lack of clearly defined structure revealing an elliptical plotting than a futile attempt to outpace his inanity.

Unstoppable, then, may be the film to remind people who fell off the Scott wagon when it hit an elevated rail curve in excess of 75 mph. Befitting a movie about a runaway train, Unstoppable is as linear as the path to which that train is bound. Without the narrative-bending worry of time travel to worry about, Scott can devote his full energies and his host of in-camera effects to jazzing up the CSX 8888 incident that occurred in northwestern Ohio in May 2001. But the changes he makes to further dramatize the story bring out some of his pet topics in recent years.

Scott turns the pre-9/11 incident into a post-9/11 one, updating the event to coincide with our altered perspective. And by changing the setting from Ohio to the even more blatantly post-industrial area of southern Pennsylvania, the director creates a blend of the natural and the manmade, the rural areas through which rails run evoking the nation's past and a more prosperous and adventurous time before running into urban decay, the endpoint of America's Manifest Destiny and the rush to industrialize.

When Will Colson (Chris Pine, looking fresh-faced even with his considerable stubble) arrives at his first day on the rails, he finds older workers who've seen that decay get worse over the years. A table of old-timers grumbles over Will's last name, linking him to the union bosses that surely gave this newbie his job through nepotism. Even without that foot in the door, though, Will and other young men likely would have taken their jobs anyway. It's cheaper to start a bunch of rookie labor at entry salary and let them go before benefits accrue than to keep funding the pensions and modestly larger checks of the vets.

Will partners with Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), who eyes the young man with the same suspicion his friends cast upon the newcomer. Will, the conductor, may be in charge of the freight train they're running that day, but Frank won't let the slightest error go without comment. A Saturday Night Live sketch spoofed the trailer for the film, playing up the overt hints of bromance and grudging-mutual-respect buddy comedy, and Unstoppable certainly contains that element. After hounding Will's ass all morning, the two bond over familial troubles, Frank with his daughters who work at Hooters and care little for their father's admittedly half-hearted attempts to win them over, Will with his estranged wife.

However, Scott's interest in macho standoffs elevates their chatter over mere pablum. Though his explorations of masculinity have never risen above a sub-Michael Mann level, Scott has a keen eye for surveying how men puff out their chests in front of each other; after all, the men in his films always toughen up and preen themselves when dealing with other men far more than they do to woo a woman. Denzel, with his shaved head removing any gray and maintaining the lingering youth of his bright face, teases, almost flirts, with Pine, that adorable young upstart with the most striking pair of baby blues to come along since Alexis Bledel. Part of the reason I never saw Scott's remake of The Talking of Pelham 123 is that the movie that played in my head -- of Scott using Travolta's butch posturing as a means of messing with that latent homosexuality so many see in the actor -- would likely be more revealing than the actual movie, and Unstoppable adds an age component to the mix, creating a faint paternal bond in addition to the usual bromance.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the freight district, the world's laziest train engineer (Ethan Suplee) has the simple task of moving a massive train loaded with enough cars to make it the length, yes, of the Chrysler Building from one area of the storage yard to another. As he only has to move the thing a bit, Dewey does not bother to tie the air brakes on the train, and when he notices a switch up ahead hasn't been activated, he jumps out of the cab to throw it himself. When he moves to get back on, the throttle slips to full speed and he cannot catch up. So now there's a giant train with no brakes barreling down the rails against incoming traffic. Oh, and did I mention that it's loaded with highly toxic and combustible chemicals?

Scott's in-your-face direction works marvelously here, distracting us from the inevitability of the runaway train coming into contact the other trains we see along the way -- the protagonists', a passenger engine carrying school children ironically there to learn about rail safety. He warps the dimensions, rarely giving us a full look at the locomotive and its cargo to emphasize how massive it is. The screech of metal on metal builds in the sound mix, overwhelming the ears and sounding like the beastly howl of a giant monster. When Frank and Will decide to unhitch their cargo and chase after the train in reverse to hook up to its rear and slow the thing down, Scott avoids the dramatic pitfalls that might come with two objects following the exact same path under constant surveillance by always stressing the pain in the men as they struggle to catch up to the speeding bomb. When they hit top speed and still cannot close in, the mounting sense of panic extends to the audience.

Impressively, Scott uses a bait-and-switch to lure the audience into a much tawdrier brand of suspense picture before moving into something much more complex. The trailers advertised the chemical train on a collision course with the one carrying children, but that particular tragedy is averted early on, shifting the focus away from a cheap, exploitative plot to one that calls more attention to the sociopolitical implications of the story. Back at the station, Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson), the yardmaster, tries to coordinate efforts but is stymied every step of the way by the corporate higher-ups who prove willing to sacrifice lives before profits. While others calculate the human cost of the train derailing on the sharp elevated curve in Stanton that couldn't possibly handle such a massive train at such a high speed, the executives, personified by the company's vice president (Kevin Dunn), cannot even stop thinking about money when considering worst-case scenarios. Thus, the train itself becomes something of a metaphor for a, wait for it, runaway economy, set in motion by those smart enough to know how the components work but too lazy to do the job thoroughly and with integrity, then perpetuated by those who stood to make the most money off the disaster.

To be honest, though, what caught my eye was the masterful and scathing indictment of the "24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator" as Jon Stewart termed the media in his closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity. The use of fake telecasts as a means of communicating plot developments has become increasingly common lately, but Scott plants his tongue firmly in cheek and reveals almost the whole of the film through news. As Dunn's VP and the other executives come up with every more useless measures designed to save money and maybe stop the train too if that would help, the media spends no time trying to get to the truth of their inane actions, accepting a refusal to comment without protest and instead swarming the rail line for coverage. TV station helicopters circle around the train so rapidly and hungrily that one concludes that anyone looking to pilot a chopper for TV news should have military training in advanced flying techniques just to avoid crashing into the other five choppers in the vicinity. Snatches of trite anchor commentary crackles at the edge of the soundtrack as Scott jumps from news footage back to his own look at the action, and we hear fatuous remarks like "That was so crazy!" said with ratings-hungry glee as a man's life is lost in one of the company's abysmal schemes. They sound uncannily like the same pundits who compared night vision footage of the bombing of Baghdad to video games. (I was also particularly amused that Scott made reference to the crutch of news footage as plot device when Dunn throws up his hands in a fit and asks why they can only ever get updates on the train from the news and not their own people.)

Unstoppable may lack the formal daring of Déjà Vu, but it easily ranks among Scott's finest work, a commemoration of post-9/11, average Joe heroism wrapped in the dark comedy of its Ernest Goes to Oklahoma City feel of accidental domestic terrorism. I've wanted to see the film since it came out, but the intervening month has brought a news story that makes the commitment to saving others at the risk of death and lasting injury from toxic fumes all the more apt: I'm speaking of course of the Republican senators voting down health care for 9/11 first responders, denying desperately needed coverage for those suffering complications arising from their acts of selflessness and patriotism. Frank and Will have no reason to risk themselves, the former being edged out to circumvent full retirement benefits, the later brought on solely as cheap labor, but they do it anyway because they would not consider the alternative.

This severity is some of the smartest material to yet appear in a Scott film, but what makes him so endlessly entertaining is that he never devolves into polemics. Fundamentally, Unstoppable has fun with its narrative, taking joy in making vehicles bound to a set route unpredictable. Backup characters like Kevin Corrigan's half-officious, half-amiable safety official and Lew Temple's madman, redneck railroad welder are fantastic and, along with Dawson and Dunn, some rare examples of interesting side players in a Scott film. As for the aesthetics, the washed-out look of muted colors cannot bleach the beauty of his backgrounds, both the forests and the industrial dumps, and they seem even more vibrant when blurred outside the speeding cabs. The only garish element is the yellow safety vest Will wears, which clashes so violently that even Frank demands he take it off in the middle of danger just to avoid insult added to injury.

Scott loves his film grain, and he compounds the hazy look of the movie at the climax by placing a container of actual grain at the back of the runaway train that explodes when the two trains meet, spraying grain over the grain. It's a hilarious, boyish trick that only someone as clever and wry as Scott could pull off in popcorn entertainment, and it's as delightful as any of the more subtle moments in Unstoppable. See it. Otherwise, there will be a hole in your 2010 viewing...the size of the Chrysler Building.