This series focuses on the one and only Michael Bay. Attempting to deconstruct his filmography, one film at a time. The ideas explored here may or may not end up in my Dissertation about Michael Bay and Post-Cinema.

And to answer the question: Does it ever rain in a Michael Bay movie?

After making more money with the sequel, work promptly started on, what at the time Bay called his final TRANSFORMERS film. A trilogy capper with Shia Lebeouf, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON has Bay go all out.

The third film adds more mythology, more explosions, more Robots, and the largest action set-piece Bay has attempted thus far.

There is some fascinating alternate-Earth timeline ideas hewre. Did you know that the Apollo 11 space program was merely a smokescreen to uncover a crashed Autobot ship. Even Buzz Aldrin himself makes an appearence to further cement this. More mythology is added to real-life events. For example, Chernobyl was a disaster because the Soviets meddled with Autobot technology. Which is a bit problematic, considering the horrifying events that occured there.

Shia LeBoeuf does a fine job acting against the worst performance I have ever seen in Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. His chemistry with Megan Fox is missed (she isn’t around because she compared Bay to Hitler), but he knows the role enough to make it work with her replacement. So much so that you can see why he had had enough of Blockbusters and decided to undertake smaller films, and art-projects. The TRANSFORMERS films helped to make him a star, but working in these films clearly can be exhausting work.

The cast list gets ridiculous. John Malkovich and Frances McDormand appear, then Ken Jeong and Andy Daly, and then Alan Tudyk shows up as the bodyguard for Agent Simmons (John Turturro). Leonard Nimoy voices Sentinal Prime in what became his last role before his death.

The Battle Of Chicago is where the film stretches its wings. I’m not going to get bogged down in plot details, because it would be utterly pointless. This whole thing is about 45 minutes long, and I would argue it is the natural end-point for his TRANSFORMERS films.

This whole invasion sequence includes violence on a mass scale, bleak visuals, seeing humans vaporized, skeletons on the ground and people dead on the streets. This is horribly bleak for a series about giant robots turning into cars.

Debris everywhere, kaliedescopic, abstract large-scale destruction. The collapse and tipping of the skyscraper is a mash of incomprehensible CGI. The Decepticon that wraps itself round the tower is as weightless and unreal as the skyscraper itself. The way the light refracts around the glass, and the way metal collides with other objects has no tacticile tangability to it. The weightlessness that became the standard in REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, hasn’t been adressed. This is the norm now for Bay. The explosions are real when they can be, but it is accompanied by consistent chaos.

I honestly think a lot more can be said about this entire half of the film. I need to rewatch this series on Chaos Cinema.

I’m done.

Does it rain? Nnnnoooooo…

Next up: Marky Mark and The Rock in PAIN & GAIN