Worst Film of the 2011: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

To kick off the Best of 2011, let's start off with the bottom of the barrel. Originally, I wasn't going to focus on any worst movie of 2011, but it made me think that yes, even a bad movie can have its merits.

I actually don't believe I've seen too many bad movies this year, I found myself enjoying them on some level. I found the often maligned "Green Lantern" to be a movie that maybe didn't work fully, but I could see something full of promise in it. By comparison, I found "Thor" to be a much less inventive movie that had a dark look to it, and not enough at stake.

Even arthouse wise, Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme" had many detractors, and I may never watch it again, however I couldn't deny some passages of pure mad genius and the need to take film into another dimension, (stay tuned for more about this later on.)

As far as the most critically lambasted movies are concerned ("Twilight" and Adam Sandler), instinct has taught me to simply stay away.

But there was one movie that did manage to ultimately dull my senses this year, and make me look at my watch more times than any other. That is "Transformers: Dark of the Moon". What an awesome piece of trash this movie is, and in some corners that could be seen as a compliment. Movies can be trashy and still be good, as Pauline Kael has taught us, afterall it's sometimes those movies claiming to be important that turn out to be terrible.

But for me "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is the worst kind of trash, it's the kind that tries showing its greatness through state of the art special effects, and big star cameos, but only leaves a wreckage of carnage in its wake.

The film is incomprehensible, annoying, and senseless. How depressing it is to see actors from the Coen Brothers stock company (Francis McDormand, John Turturro, and John Malkovich) forced to act grotesquely and play second fiddle to CGI (Although McDormand comes off the best when she must share the screen with that ham Optimus Prime)

The real crime is these robots themselves, the ones this whole movie revolves around, how uninteresting they are, and lifeless. Think of the great robots that have graced the screen of Science Fiction (Robbie the Robot, Gort, The Terminator, C3P0 and R2D2). Some of these robots never spoke a word of English, yet they remain far more interesting. The transformers are only meant to look cool, and they do, especially when they get to transform, but they are used only as mechanical plot devices literally.

In a film where the world seems to be in an apocalyptic war between robots, it all seems pretty tepid and unimportant, by the time the epic battle begins, we know where it's going and how it will resolve itself, it's going through the motions.

I suppose the reason I actually did see "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" was the director Michael Bay. I can't deny Michael Bay has a style of his own, good or bad, he's got a signature. It had been some time since I saw a Michael Bay movie, and I guess I thought it was time to revisit him and perhaps reassess his work. However my opinion of him hasn't much changed, but I will say he fits nicely in the vat of bad taste he's made for himself, and if he's happy with it, then that's fine.

I actually do hope they don't stop making films like "Transformers: Dark of the Moon", history will tell weather or not there is validity in them, my gut likes to think not, but I've been wrong before.