TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

One of the teeny hiccups in this disaster of a movie is that the Apollo astronauts can’t actually get from Tranquillity Base to “the dark side” of the moon in twenty-one minutes. See, the Moon doesn’t turn around. We never see “her beautiful behind” as the poet laments, only her lovely face. Nor would Walter Cronkite fall for this: “They’re on the dark side now, so we’ve lost contact.” This only works when—hear me now, this is important—the astronauts are in the spaceship and the spaceship travels behind the moon.

Buzz Aldrin is in this movie. Kid you not. And they got someone who’s supposed to look like JFK, I don’t know why. Why not just do whatever cinemagic they did in Forrest Gump and get the real JFK to say what they want him to say?

So here’s what happens: Long ago, there was this planet over which two machine races are civil warring. An escape pod flees just in time. It ends up on our Moon. Both we and the Russians detect the impact on the dark side, as if in the nineteen-fifties we left geiger counters or other seismic gear there that can detect both impact and nature of impact. That is, how do they know it’s an alien ship as opposed to a meteor making the new crater around the back? No one tells us, but what we do know is that the alien nature of the Moon impact is known and because of that the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris called for us to get up there quickly to beat the Russians to whatever it is that crash landed there.

We are seriously smart, that’s all there is to it, and it’s no wonder we won the Cold War. First of all, we could detect lunar impact. Second of all, we knew it was alien in nature. Third of all, we knew that the value of whatever might have survived the crash landing into our lovely moon must be of such value that the Russians were going to want it as much as we did, and we had better get there first, Bucko!

The Apollo program was thus launched, and yo howdy, we did it. It’s a shame about the three men in Apollo One, but we pushed through! We moved on. Scoped out the crash site and freakishly called it “Tranquillity Base,” odd even for MIT grads.

(By the way, this whole get-there-first-to-find-the-aliens puts a whole new twist on the Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theory, but the movie didn’t go into this sidenote, so I won’t. The Kennedys have enough trouble already, if you ask me.)

Well, get to the Moon we did, and in record time. The Eagle lands, Neil and Buzz rush over to the giant spaceship (Later we learn it is called “The Ark,” now there’s alien creativity for you!), and, in a magnificent triumph of script writing, Neil says, “We’re not alone, are we?” which is profoundly answered by Houston, “No, we’re not.”

I’ll say. There’s a giant autobot inside the crashed ship, but the guys with doctorates from MIT can’t figure it out. The other autobots wait until present day, then declare they have the technology (they can rebuild him, they can make him better than he was), so they go up to get him, which sort of makes our expenditure of a zillion dollars to outspace the Soviets sort of moot.

Anyway, his name is Septimus Prime, and he is going to take over the world and bring the old Autobot/Decepticon planet here to earth so we can all be his slaves. (Is he the seventh prime? Or is it just to say that seven is prime? Or is he the greatest of all the sevens? Not discussed.) To bring his “planet” (it looks more like a tinker-toy model of the ISS on steroids) here, he has to activate hundreds of “pillars,” which are stowed all around Earth with autobots who have assimilated into their environments. (An autobot in Africa looks like a Sudanese warlord.) To do this activation, he has to destroy Chicago, but I bet Oprah gets out in time.

The destruction of Chicago is supposed to look neato, I suppose, but I don’t get the whole buildings-fall-down as entertainment since that little episode that happened about, oh, ten years ago or so. Doesn’t amuse me to see buildings falling and papers drifting down onto the sidewalk while frightened people run away, call me a fuddy-duddy.

Anyway, Shia LaBeouf is beautiful as always. His name is Sam Witwicky and he’s in love with a girl with gigantic lips who wears clothes very similar in type to clothes worn by ladies who work weekend nights on certain street locations. In her defense, the young woman who plays this role is not an actress per se, but a British model. With that in mind, she’s superb. Lovely, blonde, and she doesn’t get dirty when buildings fall down on her, and I say, if you can keep your lips plumped and glossed while buildings fall around you, you have seriously achieved something.

Strangely, these two people are co-habiting at the beginning of the movie, but are careful to say that they haven’t advanced to “love.” By the end of the movie, the word “love” is used, but when the Bumblebee Corvette Bot plays a wedding song for them, Witwicky says, “Take it a little slower,” as if living through the end of the world together is not enough to see whether the person you are risking your life for is The One. I wanted him to say “Will you marry me?” because the way he says this in Wall Street 2 is like, “Bring on the tissues, the ladies are gonna start cryin’!”

Remember Septimus Prime—he’s the rescued bot from the moon who’s been encased in the crashed ship there for forty years because the Americans never went back, but the Russians got the pillars that destroyed Chernobyl and then the Bots have to go up there to get him out and clean his gears—when he started speaking, I groaned out loud. It’s Old Spock talking, and kid you not, he actually says, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” and I say out loud in the theater, “or the one.” Bumblebot later says, “I have been and always will be….your friend.” Nimoy needs to stop this stuff. The last time we heard from him he said, “Thrusters on full,” and I guess he took that to heart and refuses to retire. (Speaking of these guys, what is it with Shatner and Priceline? I mean, seriously!)

So. Ok. Don’t take your boys, because there’s way too much nastiness in this movie. The girl, for one, is not a love interest so much as she is a centerfold. There’s no cleavage, but lots of butt. Miles of leg. Innuendo and discussions of how the evening will be spent, and so forth. Witwicky’s parents are seriously nasty and make crude sexual comments. Don’t take your girls because they won’t like it. It’s all explosions and explosions and explosions and buildings falling down and lots and lots of glass breaking (but no one gets cut).

Personally, I like the whole idea of the Apollo program as a cover for alien contact, because at least then we would have had a reason to spend those hundreds of billions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong—I love the whole space program. It’s just nice to know it was for an actual reason.

Of course fans of the other movies will like this one. Hasbro must be out of their minds with joy. Who ever dreamed there would be such a money-printing result of those little toys.