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Transformers: Dark of the Moon

I’ve owned the soundtrack for this movie since it came out, actually, and I never bothered to watch the movie itself. I actually liked the first Transformers movie all right, in that sort of well it’s got explosions and giant robots and it makes okay background noise kind of way. Revenge of the Fallen left me in an underwhelmed place of slow-motion explosions that I didn’t manage to return to again until I had the misfortune of watching Ghost Rider 2.

Though as an aside, I’d still rather watch Nic Cage chew the scenery any day than Shia LeBouf whine.

The thing is, I actually really like the soundtracks for these movies. They make excellent writing music even if the movies themselves make me hope for a nuclear winter. What I’d like to know is how did movies this incoherent manage to have such nice music?

It’s a zen riddle.

I decided to watch Dark of the Moon tonight, just because why not, I had some braincells to kill.

Well. It sure was a thing.

I wish I could write a mocking examination of the reality-bending badness of this movie, the way io9 did back when it came out. But I’ve been working 10+ hour days all week and spending most of my time having my neurons slowly drilled into submission by Microsoft Powerpoint. I just don’t have it in me.

I am as incoherent as Dark of the Moon.

The movie can’t decide if it’s a romantic comedy, a stupid buddy comedy, an action movie, or something else entirely and I don’t even care. I don’t know who Leonard Nimoy owed money to, but I can’t fathom why he got within a thousand miles of this pulsating mass of disagreeing plotlines. Shia LeBouf seems to be a three-year old trapped in a man’s body, vacillating between soulful eyes and quivering lower lip and incoherent tantrums of petulant rage. And how the hell could something make me miss Megan Fox? How is such a thing possible unless we truly do exist in a godless universe of pain?

I never thought a movie could make me long for the smooth and logical plotline of Ghost Rider 2, but Dark of the Moon managed it. It would be a better movie, and more coherent, if you just cut together all the scenes of the Transformers fighting and just enjoyed the pure, explosion-laden eye candy. It would also be shorter, which I consider a good thing, considering every scene involving the human characters is approximately seventeen years long.

The good news is, I will still be able to listen to the glorious soundtrack without having it ruined for me, because nothing in this movie made any kind of impact beyond a vague existential discomfort caused every time Shia LeBouf screamed like an eight-year-old girl.

Next time, self, remember that curiosity caused the cat to watch really terrible movies.

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