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.

Systemic Malignancy: A Review of 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Early in 2010, Paul Greengrass decided (or, perhaps, was compelled) to make a film about the war in Iraq. Green Zone showed the hunt for WMD, the strategic folly of disbanding the Iraqi army, and the impotence of those who were manipulated by warmongers. However, to do this, names were changed, Matt Damon was cast, and John Powell’s score was cranked up during exciting chase scenes. The effect was a damning dilution of whatever was being said in the first place, which was mostly accepted public knowledge beforehand, and the lingering unease that follows the brandishing of the weapons of the enemy by the liberal left (a moral hazard best left alone).

Following an identical model, Oliver Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps depicts recent factual, cataclysmic, and widely reported historical events – the 2008 near-collapse of the global financial system, ground zero being, appropriately enough, Ground Zero. Like Greengrass, Stone upends much of the value of his project by re-aligning the facts to follow a Hollywood template, here a family drama. Shia LaBeouf’s Wall Street trader is our guide through the turmoil – but even he gives his mother $30,000 he “doesn’t have” to bail-out her failing real estate business, thus proving himself to be part of the problem in more ways than one. Indeed, Stone’s awareness of the circularity and repeatability of frailty and disaster is a rare strength in this sequel.

The other assets are put brilliantly on display in the first hour, as the naturally metaphor-oriented writer-director demonstrates more visual flair than he has in fifteen years. The titular neighbourhood glistens and gleams as invisible information shoots from one anonymous trading floor to another and an audience has a struggle keeping up. Only after the first act does it become clear that we weren’t really meant to – the meat of the story is a marriage crisis. He is a trader, she runs a lefty website; but her dad is Gordon Gekko, who has turned over a new leaf but still orders his life as a serious of predatory trades.

Gekko, played with jewelled menace by Michael Douglas, is again the star of the show, as he was in the 1987 Wall Street. He has been in jail for the entire 1990s, released in the wake of 9/11 (he then bides his time for seven years, presumably writing his book, before his stage-managed, Edmond Dantès-like return). This chronology, eliding as it does Bill Clinton’s presidency, as well as the period between the cold and on terror wars, is intriguing, as though Gekko’s such as these have no choice but to hibernate during Democratic administrations. But for all his correct predications (there’s no bigger aid to a screenwriter than hindsight), Gekko curiously lurks at the edge of events, a bystander to the systemic problems, rather than the marble-solid manifestation of them that he was in the 1980s. There is mileage in this interpretation, but not validity, certainly not with the ending Stone has in store.

The touting of the funding of fusion reactor research seems a knee-jerk move towards clean technologies, but the explanation of this reveals a paradox: intense energy is concentrated on a miniscule point, which then detonates, the immense outpouring offering more energy than was put in. Of a piece with the frequent talk throughout the film of unsustainable bubbles and systemic problems, this suggests that all optimism is deluded. A hint of this cynicism can be detected in the otherwise cloying final moments, but this vibe seems bolted on to a Hollywood template rather than ingrained in the logic of the tale being told. The tale is classical, mythical, and the entire point of myth is to reassert the continuing nature of things, the stability and order of the world. What Wall Street and Wall Street could do without is any more myth.

Like Green Zone, too much faith is placed in a radical alternative within the media. The stinging irony of this is the thudding conservatism with which both that film and Money Never Sleeps proffer their depiction of historical occurrences, changing details enough to not be libellous, and facts enough to not be accused of dullness. These are not allegations that can be levelled at The Social Network, but then that story had something of a (systemic) happy ending, and is a far more deserving companion piece to Oliver Stone’s 1980s icon in its laser-sharp revelation of the absurd institutional dynamics of the moment.

Gordon Gekko was a bracing creation in 1987, but he was ahead of the curve, the Wall Street meltdown which occurred shortly following the release being credited with much of the box office success and legendary status of Wall Street. This re-tread is hopelessly behind the times, like a two-year old Sunday supplement. However, with strong brand recognition and a vigorous marketing campaign, the film did manage to make back its $70 million budget. It’s not only banks that are too big to fail.

The Myth of Central Control: A Review of 'Eagle Eye'

There is something deeply unpalatable about the ability of characters in recent Steven Spielberg films to survive. Thrown, bashed, lodged, stretched – they always come out with nary a bruise. Of course, this is no different to the action films of many other directors, but there is a delight and glee in Spielberg’s work of the dangerous robbed of danger. He only executive produces Eagle Eye (the directing duties left to the beige DJ Caruso), but his fingerprints are all over the whirling-dervish car pile-ups and conveyor-belt shenanigans – the only difference here is that they make a fiendish kind of sense.

We can maybe believe Jason Bourne’s survival through numerous collisions and falls because he has been trained for what may as well be an eternity and has the spatial awareness and physical prowess of a robotic big cat; it frays the imagination when James Bond throws himself into another fight by literally falling off a rooftop in Seville, smashing through a glass skylight and landing with a lucky thud on internal scaffolding; when Jerry Shaw, the hero at the heart of Eagle Eye, is told to jump from the interior of a car being swung across a dock by a wrecking crane and lands on a passing barge it is completely beyond comprehension. But this film has discovered a canny stand-in for the maniacal demands of a laws-and-physics challenged action-world – Jerry is being guided by someone that knows everything. It knows when the barge will be there, it knows when Jerry needs to jump, it even knows the tone of voice to use to make him leap at the right moment.

The discombobulated voice, portrayed with an amusing matriarchal streak of disapproval by an uncredited Julianne Moore, guides both Jerry and his fellow layperson-caught-in-massive-conspiracy Rachel through car chases, downed power lines, prison breaks and fighter jet attacks, keeping them safe as they drive eighty miles an hour through a busy urban street and somehow don’t crash; she insulates them from the things other action stars avoid through sheer dumb luck (and isn’t one of pleasures of these films the look of staggered bemusement on the hero’s face as the helicopter crashes inches away?). Through this simple conceit, Eagle Eye is able to ratchet up the absurdity of its near misses while also, laughably, giving them the sheen of plausibility.

In other areas to the film goes so far over the top as to launch itself from the planet like some kind of Baudrillard-inspired mockery of modern cinematic disbelief. The parodic casting of bombshell Rosario Dawson as an Air Force Investigator and hard-case Michael Chiklis as a pacifistic Secretary of Defence; the instant “witty” banter between the young leads thirty seconds after they meet and in the midst of fleeing several dozen police agencies; the grandly incomprehensible plot which shoehorns in Islamic terrorism in the most bizarre manner possible; yet all these pale in comparison with the race-against-time finale, which (seriously) involves preventing a ten year old playing a musical instrument. Thankfully, lead Shia LaBeouf has the right look of stern panic for this kind of business (the same cannot be said of the oddly drifting Michelle Monaghan), and the script is smart enough to keep him in the dark and obeying perverse orders for much more of the running time than one would expect.

It’s certainly not for everyone, and I find it hard to conceive of a situation when I would excitedly sit down to watch it again, but the very disposability and inconsequence of Eagle Eye may be part of the point, and perhaps supremely ridiculous fictions such as these will serve as a kind of tonic and re-adjust the focus of solid Hollywood fare away from exhausted trope of dangling, landing, lithe American bodies and back towards something with an investment in character and an awareness of the unpleasantness of injury, rather than the glamour of its narrow escape. Then again, perhaps not.