A View of Destruction, From a Chicago Penthouse: A Review of 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon'

“I think World War Two just started!” screams a character in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay's Mission Accomplished take on world history. As historical revisionism it's a tad US-centric, if not wholly inaccurate. Never one to let a bad idea rest, and after re-tasking the Hoover Dam and the Pyramids of Giza in previous Transformers films, Bay now draws the Apollo programme, Sputnik and even Chernobyl into the swirling black hole whose event horizon is his own visualisation of World War Three. Only, you know, with giant robots.

Transformers:Dark of the Moon, as this third film will be called, worryingly comes out the same summer as Cars 2 and Hugh Jackman's Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot Bullshit, suggesting that any further Terminator films would be extraneous in our present era: the multinational conglomerate of Cyberdine Systems and GM Motors have already won this war. But before we can get to messing up the sheets/streets, we have the tedious business of peacetime to wade through (or, the Continuance of Boredom by Other Means) with screenwriter Ehren Kruger stickily holding our hands.

The economy is biting, and poor Sam Witwicky can't find work. His muscular frame may be busting out of his shirt, but he never gets to show it, and he's stuck in the worst kind of job-interview-montage that not even Shia LaBeouf's desperate, slightly confused mugging can save. Even his old comrade-in-arms Tyrese Gibson has quit the Air Force so he can supervise tow-tractors, a job the film considers so fitting for this sole black dramatic presence that he is forced to continue wearing his blue-collar overalls even during combat. Luckily, though, he proves useful later when it turns out he knows a bunch of guys living in motels with guns the size of Ikea floating shelves just waiting for a pick-up truck to take them to where the action is. Breathe in deep. Smell that? It's America.

Round up the old crew (except Megan Fox, she spoke out of turn, and women are just as replaceable as engine parts): the next stage of the war between Autobots and Decepticons is about to commence.

The unappealingly surly website Pajiba based their entire review of Transformers:Revenge of the Fallen around the size of Michael Bay's penis. It seems unfair to lay so much blame at Mr. Bay's door ("you can't direct!") while also thereby acknowledging the almost unparalleled dominance of his auteur signature. No-one – literally, not a soul – would cut from an extended prologue set during the space race featuring reconstructions of the moon landing, stock footage and digital recreations of Presidential addresses by Kennedy and Nixon, and the most glittering and pleasurable special effects work for some time to an unmotivated shot of (or rather, up) the bikini-clad ass of a lingerie model. In 3D.

So, while I give Michael Bay all due credit for being the most Michael Bayingest person in the universe, I still wish he'd tone it down a bit. With the Transformers franchise he has realised he is utterly bullet-proof, and he'll offer to take the audience out for dinner, but then keeps talking about how awesome it'll be later when he fucks us, but only later, after he's finished his hot wings, and maybe swung by Krispy Kreme, and closed a Mercedes product placement deal on his hands-free while fumbling down our pants. And finally, when we get fucked, we'll begrudgingly agree it was awesome. But until then we'll have to put up with tacky comic relief, urgently nonsensical plotting, and wild over-acting so pungent it made me gag. Indeed, of the two hours and thirty-four minutes to suffer through, there are only sixty or so of this film that bear thinking about.

Without any acknowledgement of dramatic timing, but rather just because the movie is over half-done and the majority of the budget has just been released to him, Bay slips Dark of the Moon into his unique and delirious third-act mode, injudicious narrative ellipses making you feel like you're playing a computer game with someone who keeps skipping those boring bits that explain plot and motivation: why are those soldiers there? What are those base-jumpers doing? How did those robots get taken hostage? Never mind – open fire! There's even a Doom-style RPG moment.

The motivation for Battle: Chicago is non-existent. Gotta lay waste to something, and with all the collapsing skyscrapers it would be little inappropriate to choose New York. In LA, back in 1988, John McClane jumped off the roof of a skyscraper as it blew up behind him, which was exciting. But for this franchise, Witwicky and the gang have to nearly fall out of a collapsing skyscraper, jump out the top, slide down the angled glass walls, shoot their way back in, evade a deadly robot, then fall out the building again as it's torn apart from the inside-out by a mechanical version of one of those worms from Dune. And that's but a small section of the fun that's had on the shore of Lake Michigan.

It's all there in the poster: a giant robot war machine, a Victoria's Secret model, city-wide devastation, and you, right in the middle of it. This beautiful emplacement is even augmented in the film with slow-motion that is genuinely sublime, in an Immanuel-Kant-bludgeoned-by-Jerry-Bruckheimer kind of way. The verisimilitude of some of these effects, finely detailed even when near-frozen in contorted and impossible scenarios – all bathed in a bright crunchy sunshine that seems to envelop you as well (this is perhaps the first 3D film to get the light balance right) – should short-circuit the logic centre of any brain over the age of twelve. The fact that it's all totally meaningless only adds to the rational spectator's exhilarated malaise.

The bad guys, after all, are called Decepticons, which doesn't really give them the opportunity to be bastions of goodwill. That said, for all their dignity and largesse, anything the Autobots said or did mostly blew past me like the lush instrumentals of Steve Jablonsky's absurd score. Those dastardly Decepticons, meanwhile, proved they were both more culturally sensitive and civic minded than their opponents by not only decamping to Chicago in the first place but setting fire to that city's awful Navy Pier. That they treat Patrick Dempsey with contempt takes them up yet another notch. (Did Jon Hamm say no to the role?). Meanwhile, Optimus Prime is still blabbing on about faith, not to mention frequently demonstrating that his top speed when in truck form is slower than his walking speed as a robot, which surely defeats the point of him ever being in truck form.

Quite accurately viewed by the press as the nadir of the contemporary summer blockbuster (from the positions of both resigned appreciation and resigned condemnation), Dark of the Moon is something to behold. For long stretches it jumps around yapping annoyingly like a chihuahua. The smashing and crashing is fun, but not a patch on the extended Rio bust-up of this year's earlier Fast Five. Hell, even Hasbro's other property G.I. Joe managed to outdo Bay at times with its frenetic imagination-on-the-run CGI deployment. But then there are times here when Bay hits his stride, and the slow-motion tumbles and crumbles are like $220m advertisements for themselves. It's like the guiltiest pleasures of Inception, but bigger and without all that talking. And since this film will make an extraordinary amount of money, you'd do well to get used to it. We're all Bay's bitches now.