Transformers: Dark of the Moon Reviews
Top CriticThe third outing for a herd of toys that should have stayed in their boxes.
Despite its manifest improvements, there is something so sour and unpleasant about the new film that it left me almost nostalgic for the innocent idiocies of its predecessor.
At 157 minutes, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" isn't just a movie. It's a sentence.
For good or ill, Bay is the soul of a new machine, the poet of post-human cinema, the CEO of Hollywood's military-entertainment complex.
Marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull.
If you're going to make a movie in which some of your stars are animated toys and much of downtown Chicago is reduced to rubble, this is the way to do it: shamelessly, with no expense spared and no cliche avoided.
One can argue that summer is built for spectacle. Now if only it could be truly spectacular, too.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a lousy movie, but at least it's a lousy movie with a serviceable story, killer CGI and an action climax that goes on forever (at least an hour).
Watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon makes you die a little inside. Is this the future of movies? God help us! Michael Bay, you've done it again.
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| Original Score: 0/4
OK, I'll admit it -- this is hard -- the big silly thing is sort of great.
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| Original Score: B
Fine actors like John Turturro and John Malkovich are encouraged to strip-mine the scenery. Frances McDormand, playing a government bigwig, can now rest content knowing she has given the worst performance of her career. (Not her fault, either.)
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| Original Score: C-
I miraculously survived a preview screening with a throbbing headache and slight nausea; others may not be so lucky.
Between Bay's obsession to make his 3-D matter and the artistry of the special effects legions amassed for the project, the visual payoff is striking.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The more action sequences, locations, actors, historical events, machines, effects, monosyllables, weapons, and American-flag close-ups the movie shoves in its mouth and ours, the less we're able to taste.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Shot by shot, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, like all of Bay's work, has a meticulous commercial sheen that's distinctive and beautiful, but he never lingers on any one of them for long, and they rarely make sense in sequence.
It's a momentous achievement and it will make untold amounts of money and you should see it even though it's hateful and empty and preaches the worst kind of reactionary violence without even really meaning it.
The biggest casualties in this third installment of the robot franchise from director Michael Bay are storytelling and character development.
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| Original Score: C
Bay provides his usual Bayisms: bloated close-ups, manly slo-mo, visual hyperbole and glamour shots of a hot babe standing amid the wreckage.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Easily the best Transformers of the series, Dark of the Moon is everything that's boisterous and lively about our big studio cinema.
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| Original Score: B
Rarely has a movie had less of a soul and less interesting characters.
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| Original Score: .5/5
By my watch, Transformers 3 is about 45 minutes too long, and that's the dull middle section before everybody starts wrecking Chicago in a reprise of The Blues Brothers.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The overwhelming sci-fi action spectacle is a merciless sensorial assault that leaves you with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
But while it's headache-inducing, that's at least a slight improvement over the migraine machine that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Don't worry about remembering the characters -- the movie certainly doesn't.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What does Optimus Prime see in the whiny Sam Witwicky? Why do both the Autobots and Decepticons keep departing Earth, only to reappear a few scenes later? And what is the evolutionary advantage of pretending to be a car, anyway?
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| Original Score: 2/4
Your brain cells perish by the thousands, their howls of agony lost to the cacophony inside your skull. Vast quantities of money, roughly equal to the GDP of Tonga, travel from America's wallets into the coffers of Paramount.
It's a thin line between the idiotically incomprehensible Revenge of the Fallen and the merely incomprehensible of Dark of the Moon.
Exposition like this starts sounding like so much gibberish, but Dark of the Moon makes it bloom on its own terms, fusing an actual semblance of reason into all those supercool action sequences.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" isn't the summer's lousiest whiz-bang movie, it's only because there's so much competition.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
A vague story is cobbled together around the increasingly mind-numbing special effects and convoluted action sequences. But by the end of the 2 1/2-hour-plus slog, it's hard to even remember where it began.
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| Original Score: 2/4
In the future, maybe Bay should abandon using a screenwriter altogether and just fill up 90 minutes with disconnected images of robo-carnage.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Even as it showcases a new degree of directorial control, Dark of the Moon remains a live-action cartoon, more a delivery mechanism for testosterone and axle grease than a satisfying dramatic experience.
Here Bay makes his best, most flexible use yet of all the flamboyant bigness at his command: Computer-drawn characters and human actors seem to occupy the same narrative for once.
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| Original Score: B
I have to admit that during the times that I wasn't feeling whatever intelligence the movie was pummeling out of me being actively insulted, I did kind of enjoy the spectacle.
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| Original Score: 3/5
"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is among Mr. Bay's best movies and by far the best 3-D sequel ever made about gigantic toys from outer space.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Bay is so afraid of boring his audience, he pitches every scene at the same high volume right from the first shot, and the effect is exhausting.
The kick of the first movie was the pleasurable shock of humans and these transformative mechanical beings interacting. The third chapter is dedicated to little more than wanton destruction.
Being able to go to the movies and not think is fine -- but that's different from going to a movie that assumes you can't think.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy...
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The funniest, best-executed film in the talking, bleeding, Earth-protecting robots-that-look-like-cars-and-trucks series, "Moon" delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Too long, too dumb and too loud, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is at least an improvement on its immediate predecessor.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Bay misses every opportunity to make something interesting out of his characters; instead, he's content to spend his enormous budget on grinding destruction so generic and visually convoluted, it's often hard to tell who we're supposed to be rooting for.
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| Original Score: 1/5
Mostly this is fairly agonising: long, loud, lurid and lacklustre.
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| Original Score: 2/5
