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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Megan Fox. Megan Fox is the only flaw of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The script by Ehren Kruger ( who wrote Top Gun: Maverick and F1 ) was written with Mikaela Banes ( Megan Fox ) as the girlfriend of Shia LaBeouf's character Sam. But because of some drama behind the scenes ( which involved Steven Spielberg for some reason ), she ultimately dropped out of the project, in very late stages of pre-production. Forcing the team to quickly patch her character out in a very forced and obvious way, replacing her with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who worked with Bay on Victoria Secret commercials. That ultimately made the film very confusing, emotionally.

There were 2 films building this relationship between Sam and Mikaela and then suddenly in film 3 she dumped him, and now Sam is totally and utterly in love with a new girl? Yeah... That doesn't feel right. Yet knowing the behind the scenes drama, and doing a very simple mental gymnastic to either think of this movie as existing in a separate continuity, or thinking of this new actress and being the same exact character as in the last two movies, and suddenly, the movie totally clicks in.

Wait... now it suddenly hit me: Sam and Mikaela. This is way too funny. Sam ( as in Samuel, or Shmuel ) is the Jewish name of Steven Spielberg ( the executive producer on these movies ) and Mikaela is definitely a reference to Michael Bay ( Mikaela Banes ). For the first two Transformers movies Spielberg and Bay ( Sam and Mikaela ) were building their relationship. And this movie foreshadows the ultimate fate of the relationship, as Bay would go away from Transformers after the 5th film.

But that's besides the point. If you think of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's character as a proxy Mikaela, suddenly the movie works very well. The film is still full of Bayhem!, especially in the later half of it. The first half of the film, you see a different side of Michael Bay, his insane ability to craft comedy.

We have multiple stellar comedic performances from Shia LaBeouf himself, to Ken Jeong's insane character, to John Malkovich, John Turturro and Frances McDormand, just to name a few. The humor is Bayhem!ed a bit. It is very silly and very weird, but very funny in the same time.

And then the movie takes a serious turn, as Decepticons attack Chicago. The movie suddenly turns into something that you may almost not expect from Michael Bay. For once instead of just trying to make glorious explosions, Bay uses a lot of effort, to show the destruction as something rather sad and tragic.

And if you are making the effort to think of Whiteley as Banes, the sequence where Sam goes into that hell-hole of a city to save her, suddenly is so touching and emotional that you barely can hold yourself from crying. The first time I saw the film ( without thinking of her as Mikaela ) I was completely confused about why the whole movie treats this moment so seriously. But with this small effort this scene, and the rest of the movie suddenly works. Everything suddenly becomes good again.

Think about this from the perspective of Michael Bay. When they finished the first film in the franchise, Paramount was quick to announce dates for the 2 other sequels. Bay wanted to take a break between the films, to do something else, to avoid thinking about robots fighting. And he did eventually took his break to do Pain and Gain. But to his surprise the studio announced dates so unrealistically close together that it meant Bay needed to pretty much work on both sequels without a break. He wanted to finish it all off already. And then as they are already starting to shoot, Megan Fox drops out. That must have been insane levels of pressure. And... to add to this... this is the biggest of the 3 first films in scale.

The fact that this movie works so well despite all of the flaws is a fucking miracle. Michael Bay is nothing short of a genius here. The way he shoots everything, the way the camera moves, the visual effects!!! The visual effects in this film were done 15 years ago... 15 fucking years ago... and yet films done today look much much worse than that. And the movie was shot in native 3D, which is like next level complexity, both on set and in post production. How the hell did Michael Bay pull this movie off in the first place?

I get it. This one actress change suddenly takes a great film and makes a stupid one out of it. But damn it. This was probably the last problem on Bay's head during the filming of this crazy movie.

Happy Hacking!!!


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