Don't Sit Down It's Time to Built Another One

With Transformers month coming to an end, I thought I would attempt a look into the future of the brand. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay's last entry in the series, is set to open in the United States in a little less than 4 months. Much has already been said about it, most notably that Megan Fox will not be reprising her role as Mikaela Banes. She will be replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, an English model who'll portray Sam Witwicky's new love interest, Carly. While I'm happy to see the introduction of a canon character (in the G1 series, Carly married Spike Witwicky and eventually became the mother of Daniel), I'm disappointed to see that a model has been cast in the role. The ratio of models who have become good actresses to models who have ended up playing the wooden-faced vamp to Steven Seagal's generic one-liner hero guy strongly favors the latter, I am sad to say, and if Mr. Bay's gratuitous use of Megan Fox as purposeless eye candy is any indicator of what we might expect from Ms. Huntington-Whiteley in the Carly role, I am not holding out much hope for the character. I have nothing against excessive use of closeups on hot chicks, mind you, but my feeling is that you don't need eye candy in a Transformers movie. The giant alien robots that transform into cars and planes are the eye candy! To be honest, I could deal with seeing less attention paid to the human storylines, but if you're going to have a human taking screentime away from Optimus Prime and Megatron, she'd better have something more than good looks to offer us. I won't shoot Rosie down just yet - that wouldn't be fair. No, I shall let her do that herself.

Next is the Cybertronian cast list. It's quite long, at least as far as the Autobots go, and this also makes me worry a bit. Roadbuster and Silverbolt are listed - the former being a member of the Wreckers, who transform into NASCAR stock cars. Unnamed robots appear on both the Autobot and Decepticon cast lists, which are constantly changing. Skids and Mudflap were on it until recently, but they are now being omitted (to my relief). The one thing this film can do without besides empty T&A is comic relief characters. Skids and Mudflap had virtually no role to play in Revenge of the Fallen and had no interactions with any other transformers besides Devastator. They were not acknowledged in any way by any Cybertronian character, not even when they were present in scenes with them. I didn't think they represented racist stereotypes, but I did think they were stupid and unnecessary. Can Bay make Dark of the Moon without a goofball character? I look at the robot cast and I see lots of potential for 3-second appearances on screen, like poor Sideways got in RotF, and the mention of a Cybertronian character that resembles Albert Einstein makes me think that Skids and Mudflap will be present in spirit even if they are ultimately written out.

I will see this film, of course. I freely admit that I am a slave to Hasbro and the Transformers brand, and not even the previous films' failings will be able to keep me out of the theater. While the first two movies left me feeling disappointed as a bound and branded Transformers fanboy, I have to admit that they were entertaining - RotF in a chaotic, Benny Hill kind of way. I know I often sound quite bitter, but I really am looking forward to Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The toys look cool, at least! And hey, Optimus Prime has a trailer this time.