Director Michael Bay takes us back to 1969 and the first landing on man on the moon in the 3rd installment of the Transformers series. An event prompted NASA to investigate but shortly later the curiosity waned and the space program closed down. Flash forward to the present and we find out that the trouble between the autobots who promote piece and the decepticons who want to dominate the world, is not over. The good guys are tricked into bringing the end of world to pass. Meanwhile Sam Witwicki (no not the one eyed green guy from Monster’s Inc) has been sidelined, gone back to school after losing his hot girlfriend only to be befriended by a new English hot girlfriend. He’s not very happy being sidelined and not able to find work after college after being a hero. But he’ll be called into action again when things get really tough.

This is a much better film than the first two in my humble opinion. This one has a plot and a storyline that makes more sense, and it’s somewhat easier for a weak guy like me to follow. In the previous movies I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. This time I could tell who was fighting who, and for some reason it was easier for me to tell the decipticons from the autobots. Besides, Leonard Nimoy has a pretty hefty part as the autobot leader before Optimus Prime, known as Sentinel Prime. He even gets to quote some of his lines from Star Trek to the delight of the audience who I have a feeling is a lot of the same people. Yes, this film has great action and great adventure. The CGI is awesome, and the battles and creatures are awesome. It’s nearly the perfect film, but I can’t rate it perfect due to one fatal problem. Shia LeBeouf’s love interest Carly Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) is absolutely dreadful. In the words of my daughter who saw the 12:01 AM premier showing, “Who would have ever thought the actress they hired would make us actually miss Megan Fox!”. She’s absolutely right. This new gal is terrible. She’s a bit of a looker, although seeing those HUGE lips on a big screen is downright scary. (Why do actresses pump up their lips in some kind of Angelina Jolie envy? It’s horrible looking). Her part is crucial all through the film, and she just didn’t carry it. Granted, Megan Fox was about the worst part of the first two as well, but at least she had the decency to try to stand off to the side and look delightful. This girl tries to be a warrior and just doesn’t pull it off. Poor Sam has bad luck in the girlfriend department and needs to try a little harder in Transformers 4.

Otherwise, the action is fantastic, sound is fantastic, and special effects are fantastic, so it’s a must see for the summer. Along with the last Harry Potter and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, this is definitely one of the 3 or 4 must see films of this summer! Enjoy!

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

It’s probably (no, definitely) pushing it to suggest that “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” has anything in common with Terrence Malick’s also-currently-in-theaters “The Tree of Life,” but that won’t stop me from claiming that the former is sort of the Mirror Universe twin of the latter. Picture Malick’s cosmos-encompassing symphony with an evil mustache, preoccupied with chaotic destruction rather than the order we make out of the universe’s dynamism and fluidity. Put another, just-as-dubious way: “The Tree of Life” is the story of self-awareness, both that of the universe (or God) and of a young boy as he grows into a man. “Transformers 3” has, like its director Michael Bay, no self-awareness whatsoever. Where Malick’s film (and indeed all of his work) is relentlessly searching, examining man’s ego and relationship to nature, Bay’s is merely that ego in its purest, most reptilian form: afraid, angry, cruel and obnoxious. Malick looks out into space, finds he is not at the center of the universe and is filled with awe. Bay, confronted with the same knowledge, says “The hell I’m not.”

Which, I think, is a perfectly valid point of view for a 300 million dollar toy commercial. Bay’s instincts are exactly aligned with this material: a world without ambiguity, introspection or any modulation of feeling. It’s the world of a child, unaware that he’s shouting all the time in public, that his hackneyed, often nonsensical jokes are terrible, and that he is not the center of the universe. He’s content to play in his sandbox and steal and/or break the neighborhood kids’ toys. Everything is felt and articulated at full volume. Even the films’ protagonist (not remotely heroic though, again, not self-aware enough to be an antihero), Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) reflects this. Having essentially taken part in one of the greatest events in human history (i.e., the discovery of and communication with an alien intelligence), Sam remains interested only in what this means for him. He whines incessantly about his job (or lack thereof), his crummy car (Bumblebee the Camaro is busy fighting bad guys) and his supposedly insanely hot girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whitely, who displays only as much personality as the script asks of her). He barges into a secure government facility with nothing more than a shouted “Don’t you know who I am?!” Of course, his mentor, the Autobot leader Optimus Prime, repeatedly entreats him (and humanity) to “believe in yourself.”

And so we see that “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” has two messages, the first of which is “Nobody is more important than you. Nothing is more important than how you feel.” The second message is that giant robots fucking up your planet is so cool and you won’t even mind. Bay, at least in the opinion of this writer, is a master of scale and barely organized cacophony; the final 45 minutes of this mammoth monsterpiece comprise a sustained assault on the city of Chicago by massive space robots, and that series of sequences contains some of the most absurdly complex, technically accomplished and amazingly exciting action sequences seen in some time. So dense with activity are these scenes, so massive in scope and so thick with detail that they are practically abstract. Specifically impressive is the way Bay manages to create vertical compositions within the wide scope frame that truly communicate the scale of these events, even if they are narratively confusing. Nobody out there, maybe not even Cameron, is combining practical stunts and pyrotechnics with CGI on this level.

It’s also important to note that there is a sincerely entertaining (and ridiculous) sci-fi action film to be found in this thing. Stripped of an hour of Bay’s positively calamitous sense of humor (gay panic, casual racism, overt sexism: these are the three tenets of Michael Bay’s comedy and without it his films would certainly be considered more acceptable), there’s actually a plot no more or less thin or inscrutable than any mainstream Hollywood summer offering. Whether you’re in any way interested in deciphering it amongst the noise is up to you. At 95 minutes instead of 157, this extreme level of bombast might even be desirable. In the end, all of this amounts to a work that is simultaneously derivative and original, insipid and fascinating. But make no mistake, none of it is an accident. Nobody screwed up. “Transformers 3” is guided by an intelligence, it just so happens that this intelligence is, for lack of a better word, evil.

==Written by Matt Lynch==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

Talk about "transforming." Michael Bay tested the patience of even the most devoted Transformers fan with the second installment of the franchise, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but the hyperactive director bounces back in energetic form with number three, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. From the long opening sequence (a zany alternate-history reading of the NASA moon program, complete with cameos by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon) through the predictably extended action climax, Bay is actually on his best behavior. Sure, his taste is as vulgar as ever (is introducing your leading lady via a lingering butt shot part of the director's personal signature?), but the story line is streamlined and the action is coherent: the constant chop-chop of the fighting sequences in Revenge is gone, replaced by a long-take approach that actually shows us who's fighting who. Plus, it's hard to resist a tilting skyscraper that allows the protagonists to slide down its glassy exterior. I know, right?

Shia LaBeouf returns, armed with a new and improbably bodacious girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley); although initially unemployed, he's drawn back into protecting the planet from giant outer-space robots, as the Decepticons menace the Earth once again. John Turturro and Josh Duhamel return to help, and Frances McDormand and John Malkovich join the club. Let's reduce critical expectations and say that if you're going to make a dumb movie about mass destruction, this is the way to do it (and if that sounds like faint praise, compare the movie to its abysmal predecessor). Throw in Hangover funnyman Ken Jeong, computer nerd Alan Tudyk doing a German accent, and the voice of Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime, and you've got yourself a three-ring circus of extremely spirited nonsense. Just how Michael Bay wants it. --Robert Horton