In most respects, Michael Bay’s third Transformers movie is just a lot more of what we already saw in the first two. Giant robots smash and bash one another for two-and-a-half hours of mayhem, destroying another major U.S. metropolis in the process, while Shia LaBeouf gets in the way and makes a nuisance of himself. However, Transformers: Dark of the Moon does bring one fairly significant improvement; it’s one of Bay’s most visually coherent films. For that, we can thank James Cameron.
Right as the success of Avatar ushered in a (short-lived) 3D resurgence, Cameron himself reportedly talked Bay into shooting the next Transformers sequel in the format, and even lent him gear and tech crew to do it properly. Somewhat out of character for the man, Bay took someone else’s advice and feedback seriously. He put real effort into making sure his third Transformers would be a good 3D experience for viewers. That meant filming scenes from mostly sensible camera angles and slowing down his normally frantic editing rhythm. As a result, the action set-pieces in Dark of the Moon are far easier to follow and understand than those in its predecessors, regardless of whether you actually watch in 3D or not.
| Title: | Transformers: Dark of the Moon |
| Year of Release: | 2011 |
| Director: | Michael Bay |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray 3D |
| Also Available On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Blu-ray Paramount+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
As for narrative coherency, Dark of the Moon is still a Michael Bay movie. You should keep your expectations in check. The story is once again a lot of dumb nonsense with an overly convoluted plot and too much of the so-called “dorky humor” that Bay swore he’d tone down after the backlash he took for Revenge of the Fallen.
Screenwriting duties for this entry are credited solely to Ehren Kruger (Scream 3, The Ring), who was at least partly responsible for the messy Revenge of the Fallen and whose main contribution here is to inundate the script with conspiracy theory hokum. In a prologue scene, we’re told that Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in 1969 was actually cover for a Top Secret mission to investigate the wreckage of a crashed Cybertronian ship. Later, we learn that the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown was really caused by alien technology the Russians recovered from that craft.
Whereas the main antagonist of the last film was Megatron’s predecessor from the Decepticons, the villain this time is… you’re never gonna believe this… Optimus Prime’s predecessor from the Autobots! The ancient Sentinel Prime (voiced by The Transformers: The Movie vet Leonard Nimoy) turned traitor and is now working with the Decepticons to enslave humanity, build a giant space bridge, and bring all of Cyberton here to Earth. In even more of a dickish mood than usual, the supposedly heroic Optimus basically lets the villains get away with this plan and murder many thousands of humans before he bothers to intervene, in order to teach us ungrateful Earthlings a lesson. Or something. Best not to exert too much mental energy trying to think about this stuff.
More importantly than any of that, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) has graduated college and needs a job! He goes on a bunch of wacky interviews before landing in the mailroom of a big tech company. Also, he broke up with his last ridiculously hot girlfriend (the one he spent all of the prior movie professing his undying love to) and has an all-new ridiculously hot girlfriend, this one played by Victoria’s Secret lingerie model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
John Turturro returns to humiliate himself one more time as the former government agent who somehow keeps getting entangled with the Autobots despite being totally incompetent. Josh Duhamel is also back to lead a team of puny human soldiers into battle with giant robots that can easily crush them underfoot. Other famous faces joining this circus to cash (hopefully substantial) paychecks include John Malkovich as Sam’s eccentric weirdo new boss, Ken Jeong as a crazy nutjob in their office, Frances McDormand as the hardass National Intelligence Director, Alan Tudyk as a butler with a goofy accent who’s also a spy for some reason, Patrick Dempsey as a rich asshole, and (most grotesquely of all) political pundit blowhard Bill O’Reilly playing himself.
Overlong and bloated as usual, the plotting in this installment takes a very long time to get going before it finally culminates with a huge action showcase in which the Decepticons lay waste to the city of Chicago. (Hilariously, their scumbag human collaborator operates out of Trump Tower.) From that point, the entire last hour of the movie is some of the finest destruction-porn devastation Michael Bay can conjure, which is saying something. The visual effects are terrific and the spectacle is seriously impressive in scope and audacity, even if some of it feels like an ILM test run for the Chitauri invasion in the following year’s The Avengers.
If my tone has come across as dismissive, I actually enjoyed Transformers: Dark of the Moon a fair amount on this watch (more so than I apparently did in my last viewing in 2012, my review for which reads more negative than I remembered it). When I asked my son, for whom I’m doing this marathon, he initially said he thought it was the best of Bay’s Transformers movies. (He later revised his rankings and shuffled things around a bit.) That may be damning it with faint praise, but at the very least, I’d put this on equal footing with the first one. While it’s still, objectively, quite stupid, the film strikes a better balance between the lowbrow humor and the action, and is far more tolerable than Revenge of the Fallen. Audiences at the time agreed, propelling the movie to become the first Transformers to gross more than $1 billion at the box office, falling only slightly behind the final Harry Potter as the second biggest hit of 2011.
The Blu-ray
Transformers: Dark of the Moon was released on Blu-ray in both 2D and 3D editions in early 2012. As happened with Revenge of the Fallen, even though I initially received a Blu-ray screener I didn’t have to pay for, I later went ahead and purchased multiple copies of the damn movie with my own money anyway – first to get the 3D version (the screener was only 2D) and then to get a MetalPak case (basically the same thing as a SteelBook but from a different manufacturer) when one came out in 2013.
Dark of the Moon was also released on 4K Ultra HD in 2017, but I never upgraded to that and am not inclined to do so now. The movie was natively filmed in 3D (not a post-conversion) with some conscientious effort put into its stereography, and to my mind 3D is its primary premium format.
With that said, I rarely have cause to watch 3D on my projector anymore. Lately, I’d been relegating that format to a smaller flat panel TV. But that seemed like a crime with a big action extravaganza like this, so I charged up my 3D glasses, tested out the 3D transmitter to make sure it’s still working, and put a little work into tweaking my settings again to get as much brightness out of the projector as I could.
Brightness is one of the biggest drawbacks to 3D, since wearing the glasses will unavoidably darken the image that hits your eyes. I’ll be honest, I struggled with it here. I have a large screen and my projector’s lamp has quite a few hours on it. Even with the lamp bumped to its highest output, Dark of the Moon was dimmer on my screen than I’d like, which also resulted in duller colors. It wasn’t unwatchable by any means, but ideally this disc could use more of a light boost than I’m able to achieve right now. (I tested some scenes on the smaller TV afterward and found the brightness better there.)
Because he was so focused on 3D, Michael Bay didn’t play around with any Variable Aspect Ratio nonsense this time out, as he had on Revenge of the Fallen and would do more of later. Dark of the Moon maintains a 2.40:1 aspect ratio start to finish.
Aside from the brightness issue, the 3D has a very naturalistic sense of depth with plenty of layering behind the screen. The action scenes also have some mild pop-out effects in front of the screen as debris from the many explosions flies in every direction. Some scenes suffer from a bit too much of a miniaturizing effect, but it’s not particularly problematic. The movie has many effective 3D moments, and most of the big set-pieces are smartly staged with 3D in mind to make the best use of the format. For my money, the film works better and is more enjoyable in 3D than in 2D.
As you’d expect from Michael Bay, the Dolby TrueHD 7.1 soundtrack is very loud and bass-heavy, with tons of extremely aggressive directional surround activity. The track also upmixes well to height speakers if you have them. The bass may be a little less intense than Revenge of the Fallen (where it’s decidedly overcranked), but is well-balanced and very satisfying.
The 3D edition came as a three-disc set: the movie in 3D on one disc, the movie in 2D on another, and a final disc for supplements. Neither of the discs for the feature have any extras. (Bay didn’t bother to do an audio commentary.) Supplements on the last disc include a thorough 110-minute making-of documentary, a half-hour NASA promo film, some multi-angle pre-viz and VFX comparisons, a handful of EPK featurettes, a still gallery, and some trailers. Buried in the EPK stuff is a brief interview with Michael Bay and James Cameron talking about how much they love 3D.
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Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the 2D Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
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