JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Director Michael Bay with Autobot Bumblebee.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon is purportedly a tale of good robots vs bad robots. But what is it REALLY about?

A. American industry, downtrodden, decimated and reeling from a recession caused by the greed and treason of its economic managers (One of the human villains is the head of a giant accounting firm), rises from the rubble just when everyone thinks it’s dead to save the world from alien oppressors.

B. Hollywood and the cineplex, having embraced 3D as a defense against downloading movies (and as a stratagem for raising ticket prices), attempts to redeem the 3D format after a series of pointless exercises (Movies like Thor and Green Lantern look the same no matter how many dimensions you pay for) by giving the audience something that will blow their eyes out the backs of their heads.

C. Like the rest of Michael Bay’s. . .oeuvre, it’s about Size. Transformers, Armaggedon, Pearl Harbor, it’s all the same banana. Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (According to reports it was originally ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ but Pink Floyd wrote them a letter) is indubitably the biggest of the lot, not just in terms of budget and special effects but for sheer hubris. It rewrites history, turning the Apollo space program into a mere subplot of the Transformers saga.

James Cameron, reigning king of the action world, invented a future history (the takeover by machines in Terminator 1 and 2) and an entire planet (Avatar) that he could play in; when he futzed with the past (like in Titanic) he stuck to the basic facts. Michael Bay recognizes no such restrictions. We bring up Cameron because we see Transformers 3 as a very large metal gauntlet thrown right in his face by the pretender Bay. Yes, T3:DOTM is Bay saying, “James Cameron, mine is bigger than yours.”