The summer is already hotting up! The first of the big movies this year, Thor, has already landed and is making something of a splash in the box office. Other great and highly anticipated movies are just around the corner and some lucky souls out there are able to view such masterpieces way in advance.

Capone, as featured on Ain’t It Cool News is one of those lucky bastards! Check out what he thought of the movie.

Firstly, if you haven’t seen anything of the movie check out the latest trailer below:

And now for the review. Be warned this contains spoilers, but if you’re reading this you already know this and if you’re anything like me you just have to know any way. Well, here it is:

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON begins with a great concept and a cool backstory (the screenplay is credited to Ehren Kruger on imdb.com, but in the print I saw, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s names were credited as well; since the credits weren’t finished, these may have been a temp credits pulled from the last movie): When the war on Cybertron between the Autobots and Decepticons appeared lost to the Autobots, their leader, Sentinal Prime, attempted to launch a craft from the planet, loaded with technology that would have saved their people. Instead, it crashed on earth’s moon and the Autobots were forced to flee to earth. Coincidentally, this moon crash happened when John F. Kennedy was president, and he immediately made his famous promise to the nation to put a man on the moon (specifically, an American man, so that we would beat the Russians to investigate the crash; see how that works?). In fact, according to this film, every NASA moon landing was actually an investigation of this wrecked spacecraft.

The first hour and a half of DARK OF THE MOON focuses primarily on story (with brief fight and chase sequences pepperd in), but it’s actually a cool story about the Autobots finding out that the technology that was supposed to save their race and planet has been sitting on the moon the entire time they’ve been on earth and nobody bothered to tell them; Optimus Prime is not amused. Naturally, we also get the continuing adventures of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), who has now graduated college and is desperately looking for his first job. He has a new girlfriend, Carly (supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), who doesn’t need an occasion to dress in the tightest clothes imaginable. Bay has a great deal of fun shooting Rosie like he’s directing a Victoria’s Secret commercial (which he probably did on his days off).

Sam is upset that he’s even looking for job, since he believes he should be working side by side with his Autobot friends, going on missions, and helping save he world. The Autobots are now firmly in place as part of America’s military, as we see from a brief mission in the Middle East early on. They would have killed Bin Laden years ago. A few Decepticons are still around, including a severely beaten down Megatron, who’s especially creepy in DARK OF THE MOON because half of his head is missing and these little spider-like robots crawl in and out of the place where his brain circuitry may have been at one time. He plucks them out, almost without noticing, which somehow makes it worse. Still, Megatron is in good spirits because a plot hatched long ago is coming to fruition.

The clever script manages to find new ways to place Transformers into world events, including one particularly nasty “accident” at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, which was actually the result of some of the moon technology being experimented on. And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that Optimus finds a way to retrieve Sentinal Prime’s body from the moon wreckage and revive him (voiced to perfection by Leonard Nimoy). I don’t feel right talking too much more about the twists and turns that lead to the Chicago showdown between a small group of humans and a massive alien robot army, but when Sam says to the Nest team “Chicago is ground zero!,” I got a fucking chill.

Let’s talk characters and performances. LaBeouf is LaBeouf; you either dig him or you don’t. I happen to dig the guy a great deal, and he seems especially focused in DARK OF THE MOON, as well as broader in the shoulders. Huntington-Whiteley is actually pretty good here and certainly miles better than Megan Fox, if only because she’s actually got something to do here beyond just looking like a million bucks. I wouldn’t say Carly has a major players in this movie, but at least she’s allowed to contribute. Also returning are Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as Nest team leaders Lennox and Epps, an shockingly enough there’s little attention paid to personal growth in either of their cases.

And let’s not forget John Turturro as former agent Simmons, who has written a book about aliens on earth and become a rich eccentric, trying desperately not to get sucked back into the alien game. Many of his scenes are with a fellow Coen Brothers regular, Frances McDormand, as Charlotte Mearing, the defense department commander in charge of missions involving the Autobots. She’s kind of hard ass who couldn’t care less that Sam wants to keep playing with his robots. “You’re not a soldier; you’re a messenger,” she rightfully reminds him.

New to the cast are such dignitaries as John Malkovich, largely wasted (but still funny) as Sam’s boss at a tech company where he eventually gets hired; Ken Jeong as co-worker with much-needed information on the moon project; Alan Tudyk, very good as Simmons right-hand man; and Patrick Dempsey, as Dylan, Carly’s boss and perhaps competition for her affections. Oh, and he also harbors a desire for world domination. I’ll thank whatever movie gods I have to that Sam’s annoying parents are barely in this TRANSFORMERS installment. Without fail, they take us out of the action on the drop of a dime, they aren’t funny, and we don’t need comic relief like this anyway when we’ve got street-smart little robots to entertain us. Yes, they’re back too, but let’s just say they’re toned down.

So what about the scenes of Chicago’s destruction? These sequences are cool for a few reasons, but let me talk about them purely from a purely action standpoint. Because the Decepticons (who have taken over the city for reasons that involve restoring their planet) can detect machines coming into their airspace, the military can’t send planes to bomb them. As a result, small teams of Nest soldiers much base jump into the city using suits that effectively make them able to fly. As much as some of you might think this was accomplished with visual effects, guess again. I saw these guys jump off the Willis Tower and the Trump Tower. Those guys fucking flew, then pulled their chutes, then landed. In watching most of the action sequences, it appeared to me that Bay opted to go practical a lot more than he has with this franchise in the past. Pretty much the only totally artificial element in DARK OF THE MOON are the robots, and what a colossal difference it makes.

And there’s something about scaling things down somewhat in the Chicago scenes that proves far more rewarding than piling on large numbers of troops and artillery. There’s one scene where Sam and Lennox are fighting a single Decepticon alone, and they manage to bring it down after a long, hard fight. Somehow, that small moment resonates so much louder than bombs and explosions that take out several bad-guy robots and half a city block at once (oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty of that as well). It’s nice to see Bay act globally by thinking locally. The other thing that happens in DARK OF THE MOON that’s spooky is that during the Chicago invasion sequence, civilians actually die…in large numbers, leaving behind a pile of clothes and a stripped down, scattered skeleton (it sounds silly, I know, but it’s actually kind of traumatizing).

Whilst I never thought I’d hear the phrase ‘clever script’ in reference to a Michael Bay film, but nevertheless judging from Capone’s description of the movie above the movie does sound all kinds of awesome and I can’t wait to head to the cinema and catch this one in 3D.

What do you guys think?

via AICN

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