As in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor and the other Transformers, Bay once again shoots the works and tries to blow the house down, and he often does. But there‘s a change. The first two Transformers were, for me, too heavily weighted toward the action scenes, with the all-out carnage laced all the way through and consuming them from the start. Those movies, especially Revenge of the Fallen, didn’t spend much time on character or dialogue, even on bad character and dialogue, and they relied on LaBeouf’s boyish looks of distracted concern to try to pump in some humanity.
　
Transformers: Dark of the Moon was written by Ehren Kruger, who was also one of the culprits responsible for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — but who has ably scripted other action moves from John Frankenheimer’s late-career thriller Reindeer Games on. (Yes, I’ve heard the story about the Frankenheimer-Bay connection.)
 
As written by Kruger, the new show has a fairly simple obvious story. But at least it’s a story. And it has mostly caricatures instead of characters. But we spend more time with them, and they’re sometimes engaging or lively, and there are a lot of them, often played by very good actors, like the Coen Brothers-ish ensemble of Frances McDormand, John Malkovich and John Turturro. Most of those actors seem to be enjoying themselves, maybe only in contemplation of the huge compensation waiting for them, but also perhaps because it’s fun to tear a big important city apart in a movie.
 
Bay’s Dark is hipped on destruction and sometimes madly irreverent: At one point, Bay and Kruger have bad robot Megatron blow up the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial and then clamber up on Lincoln‘s chair, in a scene that actually made me queasy. Throughout Dark of the Moon, mostly in its third act, people fall out of skyscraper windows, trigger mass explosions, and otherwise behave as if the world were some kind of mad playground for pathological toys and children.
 
The surprise is that Bay and Kruger have actually, this time out, taken so much more time and effort with the non-action sequences. I‘m not saying these are great (or even, most of the time, good) comic and dramatic scenes. But they help the movie strike more of a balance, with Bay downloading most of the slambang stuff to that last near-hour of nonstop Chicago havoc.
 

Dark of the Moon is loaded with backstory too, even if you haven’t seen the other movies. Bay and Kruger add a cameo for JFK, suggesting that the robot wars have part of their roots in a covered-up incident back in the ‘60s involving mysterious doings on the dark side of the moon, with the whole space program actually (it says here) instigated by JFK to discover what was up over there.
 
And the new movie reintroduces us to a lot of old characters: La Beouf as our hero Sam Witwicky (who has helped save the world twice and still can’t get a job better than the mail room), Sam’s new girlfriend Carly (played by British supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, apparently after the series’ original hottie, Megan Fox, got too candid about the series), those ever-ready soldiers Lt Col. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson), and the electric FBI guy Seymour Simmons (Turturro, doing a Nic Cage-ish turn).
 
New ones too. Malkovich sneering it up as Sam‘s snobby employer Bruce Brazos; Ken Jeong doing another politically incorrect gig as Brazos’ toilet-obsessed director of research and development Jerry Wang (old wine in an old bottle for Jeong by now, but at least they didn’t call him Jerry Schlong), Patrick Dempsey as Sam’s smug romantic rival Dylan Gould, and McDormand as national intelligence chief Charlotte Mearing — an utterly thankless role. There are also walk-ons by astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Fox News tantrum-tosser Bill O‘Relly as themselves. Aldrin is there to lend credibility to the conspiracy theory and O’Reilly is there to blow his top about the autobots. Less convincing are the computer recreations of JFK and Tricky Dick Nixon, who are there for exposition.
 
You’ll notice that there are a lot of characters; the cast list has a lot more. And I haven‘t even started naming the robots: a heavy metal Hasbro gang that includes Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, Leonard Nimoy (no less) as Sentinel Prime, Hugo Weaving as the villainous Megatron, James Remar as Sideswipe, Frank Welker as Shockwave, Keith Szrarbajka as Laserbreak, and Timothy Spall as Oilchange. (No, just kidding.)
 
Not usually singled out, but certainly deserving of it here, are the artists and technicians who made this movie pop: special effects supervisor John Frazier, visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar, production designer Nigel Phelps, animation supervisor Scott Benza and stunt co-odinator Ken Bates. The 3D, touted as an improvement, is a little brighter than usual, and the depth of field a little better used. (Stuff keeps flying at the cameras, including, as many critics have noted, Ms. Huntington-Whiteley’s derriere.)
 
All this is just to suggest that the new Transformers, while definitely flawed (it’s too loud, too frantically edited) doesn’t necessarily signal the End of Cinema as We Know It, or a Horrible New Trend Which, If Left Unchecked, will Turn All Our Minds into Mush.
 
In fact, Bay by now has such a highly recognizable and distinct visual and editing style — and even a kind of catalogue of themes (catastrophe, friendship, romantic rivalry, imprisonment, technology and its dangers) — that you might justly describe him as more than a high tech expert: maybe a pop auteur without honor. That’s obviously part of the way he sees himself; he’s helped put two of his movies, The Rock and Armageddon, out in classy Criterion editions.
 
Bay’s movies tend to blend annoying excess with extraordinary technical skill, and that may be a big part of what annoys the people who treat him as a cinematic Antichrist: the contrast between his obvious talent and the obnoxious uses (and scripts) to which he often applies it. Some day in the future, I suspect, Bay may win over at least some of the buffs ad movie pundits who keep relentlessly bashing him now. But it won’t be for a movie like this. More likely, it’ll be for something smaller, less effects-heavy, more intimate (that wouldn’t be hard) — and not in 3D.
　

Dark of the Moon, alienating as it may be to some, is still an impressive pieces of movie technology, and easily the best of the three Transformers movies. Admittedly, that’s not saying all that much. But I’d be lying if I said that a lot of it didn’t entertain me. I’d also be lying if I said that, even after three movies, I could keep all those robots straight all the time.
 
A lot of the movie was obnoxious, too loud and incoherent. But so is the evening news. Maybe you can defend this movie, and Bay movies in general, sort of, by saying that they reflect our obnoxious, overloud, incoherent times — and the obnoxious, overloud, incoherent people who often, annoyingly enough, run them and comment on them. Admittedly, that way lies madness. And, as Sentinel Prime/Spock observes: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” (True, I guess, sometimes….at least when you’re compiling box office reports.) No extras. A deluxe edition, with extras, will be out later this year, according to Bay.

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