Jeremy’s Tophunder №87: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

6 min readMay 18, 2020

We made it. We finally reached the worst movie on my list.

Of the Tophunder, nearly half of them (48) sport a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90 percent or higher. More than two-thirds of them (67) feature a score north of 80 percent. Just four received a score below 50 percent. The lowest score on the list actually goes to D2: The Mighty Ducks (just 20 percent of its reviews were positive), but I abjectly refuse to acknowledge anyone who thinks D2 is a bad movie. They’re wrong and they should feel stupid for thinking that.

Transformers, meanwhile, the 99th-best reviewed movie in my Tophunder, clocks in at 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and I’m actually a little surprised it’s that high.

This movie is -terrible-.

I mean, it’s fantastic and ridiculous and I love it, but it’s objectively terrible.

You know how you can tell it’s terrible? The first line of text you see on the screen is pretty standard — “Paramount Pictures presents.” The next text you see is the dead giveaway, reading “In Association with Hasbro.” And sure, I get it, you have to credit the company that created the toy line that inspired the animated series that was then spun off into these movies. But how can you possibly expect to be taken seriously?

The short answer — you don’t. You lean into the fact that your movie is based on a children’s toy line (and not even a particularly popular one among today’s kids at that) and you make a bloated, two-and-a-half hour, effects driven piece of garbage devoid of literally any artistic merit.

And you do it incredibly well.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in my eyes, is the purest distillation of the type of movie that willfully eschews any semblance of a coherent story in favor of just looking cool and having crazy special effects and set pieces. I’m sure there are other movies out there that have a reasonable argument for that crown, but Transformers just takes it to another level.

The second Transformers movie (Revenge of The Fallen) is probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It almost made the list. Dark of the Moon took the parts of Revenge of the Fallen that were *actually* bad (it was hard to tell which Transformers were good guys and which were bad guys, and some of the action sequences were actually kind of visually unintelligible) and made them well, less bad.

For one, the made the Decepticons look a lot more reptilian, and we all know that reptiles are evil. As for the action sequences — they filmed most of the movie in 3D, using the same exact technology that James Cameron used on Avatar.

Transformers never got quite enough credit for its visuals — Cameron talked Michael Bay into using the same cameras and methods from Avatar, and Bay actually took that and ran with it, spending almost a year taking the underlying technology to develop a smaller, more portable 3D camera that could be taken on location. Is the 3D as great as it was in Avatar? No, not quite. But it’s on the short list of movies that actually did 3D the right away and actually made the movie better. There aren’t too many movies that did it, but for some reason Transformers never really got the recognition it probably deserved.

There’s just a lot of cool stuff packed into the movie — it presents an alternate history where the Transformers were the reason behind the Apollo space program and the Chernobyl disaster. Are those topics fully explored? No, of course not. They’re just hand-waved away as soon as they’ve sufficiently moved the plot along. That’s the kind of storytelling that I’ve come to expect out of Michael Bay, and by God does he deliver here.

There are also a plethora of amazing cameos and minor characters that really take the movie over the top. John Malkovich and Frances McDormand both show up and are just perfectly extra in every way. And this is Malkovich, who has been nominated for two Oscars, and McDormand, who has been nominated for five (winning two). They get backed up by Ken Jeong, John Turturo, and the absolutely incredible Alan Tudyk. Tudyk is probably my favorite character actor in Hollywood today, and he’s one of the high points of the movie. The best cameo, however, is one that went largely unnoticed. Hardcore Eddy, one of the former NEST soldiers, was played by Lester Speight, who is probably best know for his role as, yes, that’s right, Terry Tate: Office Linebacker.

Terry Tate is in this movie. And you’re seriously wondering why it found a home in my Tophunder? Don’t be ridiculous.

Dark of the Moon also introduces Shockwave, probably my favorite Decepticon from the old animated series, and pairs him with a driller, described as “The largest subterranean lifeform native to Cybertron. Enormous multi-tentacled beasts capable of burrowing through the ground or through buildings with ease, they are capable of great destruction and carnage on any scale.”

Yeah, I’m into that. If you’re looking for a Transformers version of the giant sandworms from the Tremors franchise, this is the guy you’ve been waiting for. He shows up sparingly, but every time he does is holy-crap level awesome.

I went into a decent amount of detail why I can’t help but like Michael Bay movies when I recapped The Rock a few weeks ago, and all of those thoughts still apply today. I don’t have a good reason for liking his movies, because they’re objectively bad. But for one reason or another, I just get sucked in so easily. I’ve seen most of them in theaters. I saw this one in theaters twice. I know they’re bad, I just don’t care.

Dark of the Moon is probably the best movie in the Transformers franchise, or at least the one I most associate with this type of movie. I suppose the first one is technically the “best” one (or at least the one least reviled by critics), but Dark of the Moon is when the series peaked from a sheer ridiculous perspective.

Every once in a while, I don’t want to pay attention to a good movie, I want to barely pay attention to a 150-minute train wreck. And when that’s the kind of mood I’m in, nothing can really compare to Bayhem. And that’s why Transformers: Dark of the Moon makes the list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11