Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Something is frozen in space. Villains on earth prepare busily for its return. Subtitles inform us of the locations of various shady doings. Meanwhile, our hero spends time in bed with his shapely lady-friend, unaware that dark forces are rising. We're all set for a self-aware adventure with action, laughs a-plenty and a likeable cast of larger than life bad guys, good guys and babes.

Regrettably, that was the beginning of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a movie whose action sequences contain roughly 50 times more sense of jeopardy than anything in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, which is a very long mess that's embarrassingly devoid of gut level thrills.

In fairness to Transformers, the location subtitles do include such classics as "Middle East: Illegal Nuclear Site", though without the apparent satirical intent of the Austin Powers films. Intentional moments of humour include one of Shia Le Beouf's wacky robot sidekicks admitting to having rooted through the underwear drawer of Megan Fox replacement Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. This fiendishly clever gag works on at least two levels. Firstly, it's funny because it reminds us that girls wear underwear, which means girls have rude bits, which is - duh - hilarious, and a bit sexy. Secondly and even more cleverly, it sets up a dissonance between 1. the expectation that a robot from another planet would have little in the way of sexual urges directed at human females, and 2. the actuality that the robot is in fact quite intrigued by Rosie's lingerie. In the parlance of Bill & Ted, he may have "a full-on robot chubby."

Such is the taut efficiency of this gag that it also functions by way of an oblique compliment to the extraordinary head-turning hotness of Ms Huntington-Whiteley: her sex appeal can even arouse non-human entities. Since her character seems to have been written less for the fantasy of what it would be like to get to sleep with her (she and Shia have minimal one-on-one screentime), and more for the fantasy of what it would be like to have other boys know that she is your girl (there are plenty of 'that's your girlfriend?' scenes), this is the perfect outcome. That's because this film is targeted at a mental age when doing stuff with a hot girl is of secondary importance to being able to tell your mates you've done stuff with a hot girl.

Still, despite its spot-on understanding of its target audience's arrested sexual development, the film surely falls down when it comes to action. The numbest of numbskulls understand that it's very difficult to have a good action sequence without having some investment in the outcome of said sequence - otherwise you might as well tune in and just watch a big fire burning, forever, no characters, no dialogue, just fire, forever, right? Boom. Yeah, it didn't have much in the way of acting, that massive fire, but didn't it look pretty?

So, in order to care, we have to believe that something we recognise as a character is credibly in peril, and that's exactly what Michael Bay can't quite seem to deliver here, no matter how expensively choreographed and realistic looking the collapsing buildings. Perhaps it's because the person in the film that seems to most stand in for Bay's point of view is the guy who figures the machines are taking over anyway - why not help them out and reap the rewards? Character and humour are dead, man, the machines are where the future's at! The last forty minutes of this film are the action movie equivalent of the comedy 'Ass' seen in the film Idiocracy - an endless close up shot of an arse that occasionally breaks wind. But hey, the presumed audience loves it, so that's ok.

In Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, the robot who has been sleeping on the moon waiting for his prince Optimus Prime to rouse him is called Sentinel Prime. In the Arthur C Clarke short sci-fi story 'The Sentinel' from which 2001: A Space Odyssey sprang, the Sentinel is a watcher left on the moon to signal to its makers when it is disturbed, as a sign that the human race has finally become sufficiently advanced to be interesting. Here, Bay sends any aliens monitoring our culture for evidence we've developed as a species a clear message not to worry just yet.