They rock and sock! They rock and sock and rock! Rock! Rock! Rock! Sock! Sock! Sock! They’re Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon! And man do they ever inhabit the spirit of Rock’em Sock’em Robots! This movie is one massive ACTION GIANORAMA! It fulfills the action quotient for the entire summer! So to sum up: Transformers 3 is a pretty damn good action flick.

But the movie is senselessly chaotic, and with such odd pacing and side characters, it fails to become more than just a spectacle.  Some spoilers to follow.

He will blow your freakin' head off, man!

As I’ve said so many times before, this movie is all action. And it’s good action too. If all you want is mindless explosions and running and dirty protagonists and smashing and KABLAM-Os, then this movie is perfect for you. Just like the first two Transformers movies were. The entire last hour of the movie has got to be the biggest action set piece I’ve ever seen! And it’s relatively exciting. There are even a few really good twists that keep the story moving along. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a fine movie to see on the big screen.

But it’s not glorious cinema. There’s no deeper level on which to appreciate Transformers 3. It is what it is and that’s all that it is, and needs to be. It’ll make hundreds of millions of dollars and it will entertain hundreds of millions of people. There’s nothing wrong with that. It definitely improves on the mindless insanity of Transformers 2, but it doesn’t live up to the crisp, controlled excitement of Transformers 1. So it could be better, but what more were you hoping for?

Personally, I was hoping for a better handling of the titular characters. Once again the biggest flaw in this franchise is how utterly wasted the Transformers are, both good guys and bad guys.

The Autobots and Decepticons are at war again for the fate of the planet Earth, with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and a few other familiar faces caught in the middle. The Autobots suddenly discover that there’s some important stuff related to Transformers history buried on the moon, and when they go to recover the stuff, it sets of the Decepticons’ latest attempt to take over the Earth. It all builds to an epic battle in Chicago (though it might as well be any major city) where the Autobots and their human allies try to stop the Decepticons’ ultimate weapon.

And all the while, Sam’s new girlfriend (because the old girlfriend got into an off-stage catfight with the director) is being held hostage in Chicago, so he cowboys up and goes in to rescue her.

I refuse to show that bimbo. So here's the firetruck who isn't Inferno!

The action is phenomenal, even if it can be mindless. There is one scene where the (human) good guys are climbing to the upper levels of a skyscraper until they find a good floor from which to fire their rocket. They hope to take out the bad guy’s main weapon with that rocket. For some reason, the Decepticons start trying to cut the skyscraper in half, which causes the upper floors to start tipping over. The good guys jump out a few windows, start sliding down the side of the skyscraper and then shoot out some lower windows so that they drop into a lower floor. That’s pretty awesome! Action scenes like that are why we go to the movies!

But after all of that, they didn’t even fire their rocket. And they wind up back on the ground a few minutes later. So that entire adventure in the skyscraper was for nothing! They didn’t even have a scene where they lament failing to fire their rocket. The movie just keeps going. And the whole reason they had to jump out of the windows was because Decepticons had found them on that floor…but there was a brief scene where the Decepticons were searching that floor while the good guys hid behind office furniture. Out of all the floors on that skyscraper, why did the Decepticons pick that one specifically if they didn’t already know the humans were there? And why search for them? Why not just blow up that floor?

Epic skyscraper sliding scene!

It’s all incredibly nonsensical. Scenes are strung together haphazardly with little logic. Characters show up out of nowhere and then disappear again immediately after, leaving you wondering where the hell they’ve been this entire time. At one point in siege of Chicago, Bumblebee comes out of nowhere (after being offscreen for 20+ minutes), saves Sam from falling, and then is gone a moment later. Sam says Bumblebee’s going to join the rest of the Autobots up river. Next we see him, all the Autobots have randomly been taken prisoner in the middle of the street. When did that happen?

And towards the beginning, after the Government thanks Sam for uncovering the secret of the stuff on the moon, he’s told to be a good boy and just go home. Instead he recruits John Turturro and together they investigate a Russian Cosmonaut plot about that same stuff on the moon. And a few of the extra Autobots show up to randomly help Sam and Turturro, even though the Government told Sam not to do this kind of thing. Sure enough, Sam once again unlocks all the important info. Why wasn’t the Government investigating the Cosmonauts? Why can Sam all of a sudden rally all of the troops out of nowhere once he’s figured out the big secret?

Maybe because Sam Witwicky is a boss!

Do you want to know why this movie will make hundreds of millions of dollars, while Green Lantern bombed? Because when Sam freakin’ Witwicky sees a problem, he gets in its face and solves the damn problem! He doesn’t sit around and whine about not having the right stuff. Obviously the action will play a big part in the big bucks, but this franchise has always handled their protagonist very well.

Sam the man

I have enjoyed Shia LaBeouf’s performances through all three movies, even if he can get incredibly manic and shouty at times. He’s relatable, he’s heroic and he can be pretty badass at times. He’s saved the world twice now, and at the beginning of this movie, he can’t even get a job. He feels powerless because he has no real purpose with the Government and the Autobots, and it’s true. He just so happened to be the guy who met Bumblebee in the first movie. He’s not a soldier and he’s not a CIA agent, so he has no purpose with the Autobot/Army alliance. Yet he desperately wants to matter. That’s good character motivation.LaBeouf has always portrayed Sam’s down-to-Earth nature very well. One of the best aspects of Transformers 1 was the human element.

Sam even gets to kill a Decepticon! And not in an accidental sort of way. He straight up confronts the giant robot head-on and obliterates it! Green Lantern didn’t do shit!

All of the human actors who return to this film are handled well. Turturro’s role has improved, he’s treated with a lot more respect. The two soldiers, the white one and the black one, continue to be badass and soldiery. The black one even gets some pretty stand out moments. Sam’s parents are given a much smaller role, and they’re OK, but they don’t get much to do. They had the only good scene in all of Transformers 2, but they sadly don’t follow up on that emotion.

(It was the one near the end in the desert when they want to naturally protect their son, but he’s got to save the world. Awesome scene in the midst of complete and total crap.)

All of the new human actors are pretty much crap characters. We get a new hardass Government rep who once again thinks she’s the boss of all the Transformers and all the characters, but is quickly made irrelevant. They trot out John Malkovich for a stupid little part in the beginning. The Asian guy from the Hangover movies, and who plays Chang on Community, has a small but incredibly obnoxious role. He played his schtick too far and the movie was better for his departing early and painfully. There’s also a human villain who serves his role well as a Decepticon-collaborator.

The new bimbo provides pretty eye candy and is a rather nice character, but she’s bland and shallow and doesn’t establish the sort of action babe connection that Megan Fox did. She’s the hottie that Sam Witwicky managed to hook up with before the movie starts, so their relationship just is – and that relationship is then turned into the driving force behind a lot of Sam’s actions.

The firetruck we should have had: Inferno! My childhood favorite.

But the absolute worst character in the movie is Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) as Dutch, Turturro’s assistant. He’s the very definition of extraneous and ridiculous. He starts out as Tuturro’s effeminate publicist (Turturro wrote a book), then randomly becomes a repressed action fighter a la Jason Bourne, and then even later becomes a master hacker able to hack into cell phone cameras and bridge controls when the movie needs them. And he does so from the computers at the good guy’s base! It’s like the movie backed itself into a corner for no particular reason, then introduced a character who could simply get them out of that corner and then wrapped that all up into one new character. Ta da!

And to think, all of that time spent with Tudyk could have been spent getting to know the Transformers.

This is my #1 complaint about the Transformers movies. This franchise seems absolutely against fleshing out the Transformers as characters. In the first film, even though the main cast of Autobots get more lines and scenes, none of them have any meaningful interactions with any of the humans. They may as well have just been silent. It gets even worse in the second movie. None of the robots, with the slight exceptions of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, have any real interesting or meaningful moments or dialogue with any of the humans whatsoever. And after the first movie, they don’t even get anything meaningful to say to each other!

The only character who develops any sort of connection with a human, Bumblebee, is given the specific disability of being mute! He has to speak through crappy radio broadcasts and movie quotes. For all three movies! WHY!?!? In Dark of the Moon, they have him piecing together full sentences using radio quotes, so he’s essentially talking. But he’s not really talking! It’s insane! But at least Bumblebee is suitably heroic.

Bumblebee is a character in this movie

Just like Optimus Prime is suitably badass. He kicks a lot of butt in this movie, moreso than the others combined. So that’s pretty cool. But Prime might as well be off in a world of his own. He barely says two words to any of the humans, even Sam. But he gets to kill bad guys and have a jetpack for some reason. So that’s pretty cool. The rest of the Transformers who were in the first movie reappear, Ironhide and Ratchet, but they have just as much to do in this movie as they did in the second movie. They’re lucky to even get lines. You can just sort of recognize Ratcher as the green one. And thankfully I think someone says “Ironhide” when he appears on screen, so you can sort of remember him. They don’t do anything. At the very least they had one-note personalities in Transformers 1, but they don’t even get that in this movie.

I don’t think any of the Transformers introduced in the second movie come back. Other than that little guy who humped Megan Fox’s leg. He also gets a sidekick and they have wacky tiny Transformer adventures. It’s like Michael Bay desperately wanted to keep the two-man comedy team from Transformers 2, but didn’t want to use the Twins that everybody said were racist. So he just used these two.

Some new Autoboats are introduced in this film, but you’ll barely get a name, if even that. There’s a silver car and a red car, and the red car has some cool blades and an accent. That’s all you know about them. They drive around in car mode a lot in the beginning, like you’re supposed to remember that ‘oh right, there’s a silver and a red car on the team now’. Then they barely appear in the background during the siege of Chicago scenes. There’s some old guy weapons-maker Transformer who gets a brief scene at the beginning and then a brief scene towards the end. No name. I’m not even sure what he transformed into. They also introduce a team called The Wreckers, who are stock cars. They don’t get individual names, but at least someone always says “The Wreckers” whenever they’re around so you know it’s them. One of the Wreckers is fat, so he’s easy to recognize. Oh hey look, it’s that tubby Transformer again. Good for him.

None of these new Transformers matter. They don’t do anything besides hang out in the background and maybe do some confusing action stuff. And other than Megatron and Starscream, the Decepticons don’t even get vehicle modes! They’re just generic robots. (Except for one brief scene of a Decepticon taking the form of a Waste Management garbage truck. I assume that was just for the product placement, since he never returns. And I wanted him to return, dammit!) I realize that the movie has to bow down to the car companies, but couldn’t some of the Transformers take on cool forms? A garbage truck is unique. A tank is cool. Why not a school bus Transformer? Or anything other than similar looking cars or SUVs?

For all the fun of the movie’s action scenes and human characters, once again Transformers utterly wastes its titular characters. They might as well just be the voiceless aliens from Independence Day or the tornado from Twister.

Except, of course, for the Mountain Dew Transformer from the end of the first film! I love that guy! We need more of him!

I want an entire comic book tie-in about him!