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Never thought I'd find myself sticking up for the ungracious Megan Fox who appeared in the first two Transformer pictures, but she's a helluva better actress than the comely Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who comes to this movie direct from a Victoria's Secret runway.
OK, that's not saying much as Fox isn't a great thespian, but she can utter lines better than Huntington-Whiteley does in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in director Michael Bay's series of sci-fi epics featuring the heroic Autobots and the nasty Decepticons.
For those of you who have been living on a planet far, far away, you should know that Fox was dismissed from Dark of the Moon before shooting began for dissing Bay in a magazine interview.
Huntington-Whiteley plays Carly Miller who works for some Washington government organisation.
She hooks up with the movie's human hero Sam Witwicky ,played ,for the third time by Shia LaBeouf.
Huntington-Whiteley shows up in a figure-hugging, tighty-whitey dress but she's all window dressing and doesn't exactly excel at delivering her banal lines. Poor Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. She may be beautiful but she can't act for toffee.
As one wag joked after the screening I attended in London, 'Rosie makes Megan's acting look as good as Kate Winslet's'.
Well, that might be stretching it a bit, and bringing Kate Winslet into it is a bit of an insult, but I knew what he meant.
And ,it could be said that this kind of automated, 3D extravaganza doesn't require actors with great thespian skills, although Oscar winner Frances McDormand playing head of the national intelligence agency is class personified.
It's the action between the good guys, sorry, robots, led by Optimus Prime and the Deceptiicons that counts and Bay doesn't disappoint.
There are some fabulous action sequences and epic battles that take your breath away.
It's technically sublime, but if does go on a bit. After two and a half hours I did feel as If I was suffering from metal fatigue.
However, Bay sets the story up well with a prologue set in the early 60s, when Kennedy was in the White House, and the movie suggests that the space race between The USA and Russia was kicked off when each nation detected an unknown vessel had crashed on the dark side of the moon.
By the way, this is the second summer blockbuster that begins in the Sixties .Remember , Matthew Vaughn's briliant X Men:First Class. That , too, was set against a backdrop of the 60s.
Anyway, the American moon astronauts had a secret mission, they had the task of finding out what had crash-landed there.
Decades later, with President Obama in office (we get to see Nixon in the White House, too) the 'package' from the moon turns out to be more than bad news.
Could this be the end of the Earth as we know it? Not if Optimus and his transformers can help it.
There's plenty of deception and betrayal to add to the mix and a pretty scary giant metal worm creature that causes a lotta havoc.
These Transformer movies are nonsense, of course, but they allow Bay and his team to push the envelope as far as movie technology is concerned and at least you feel get a sense of the shock and awe of giant hulking metal creatures clashing.
After a while though your brain yearns for signs of intelligent life in the universe. You know, creatures who can, perhaps, hold a sensible conversations instead of merely booming in a baritone voice about the end of this and the end of that.
That said, I enjoyed the odd flashes of wit ,like a scene showing a bit of Star Trek featuring Spock
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and, as every Transformer fanboy knows, Leonard Nimoy provides the voice of Sentinel Prime.
And Bay has a couple of mini Autobots deliver a withering smackdown of Fox's character Mikaela Banes.
It's an amusing moment, to be sure, but a bit below the belt.
Bay didn't need to make such an obvious dig about Fox,especially as she's not in the movie and doesn't have a right of reply.
Watch Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Unseen Hot Videos
Watch Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Unseen Hot Videos
