Transformers: Dark Of The Moon' - same as before

Film: "Transformers - Dark Of The Moon"; Director: Michael Bay; Cast: Shia  LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Tyrese Gibson; Rating: **

Ever since the first part, the "Transformer" series has been abysmally  stupid, cinematically crass and viscerally dumb. But then going by the new  capitalistic mantra for cinema, anything that sells cannot be dumb. Thus you  have another version of the same film you've seen twice before starring  teenagers whose range of emotions are fewer than creases on a child's cheek and lots of machines shifting from cars to robots, bleeding oil.

The story has never been the strong point of "Transformers" and even here as  well it is best described in one sentence - after learning of a crashed  spaceship from their planet on the dark side of the moon, the benign  Autobots race to find it before the Decepticons do.

It isn't the background score that has been its strength either - in the din  of squealing robots, there's no space for any. As far as acting goes, the  human actors are more robotic than the robots.

The strength of "Transformers" is its special effects. Indeed one look at  any of the three films and it seems that the only purpose they exist is so  as to excite our perverse senses, through teenage skin show, or through the  loud, crass violence that goes on and on in the film. Thus violence and  booty junkies, which the world is full of, would simply trip on this film.

There are desperate attempts at bringing some emotions though some bad  teenage jealousies, or honour in Optimus Prime respecting human decision to  exile them. But all these fall like a pack of cards at the altar of teenage titillation, pointless jingoism, and mindless violence.
 
Like the other two "Transformer" films, after a point you forget who's  fighting who. All you see is big metal things transforming mid-air and  slashing one another. And that's about all there is to the film indeed. Watching it is like children sitting in front of the TV, watching anything  just because something is moving on the screen.

Megan Fox is replaced by supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who like Ben  Stiller's character in the satire "Zoolander", seems to have only one pouted-lips expression in the entire film.

The only metaphor that this version of the successful franchise ends up  drawing, just like the other two, is against a visually challenged and  overwhelmed society that needs extremities of visual stimulations to like  something. And that is something that is neither good for cinema, or for  society.