Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey Director: Michael Bay

    A FEW minor adjustments notwithstanding, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is very much the same bucket of bolts that audiences have come to expect from this franchise from its first two installments. And while that commitment to consistency will surely guarantee rousing revenue, one wonders when director Michael Bay’s visually assaulting but tone-deaf films will start to lose their luster with audiences. Nonetheless, the movie’s undeniably impressive 3D design will surely be praised at the expense of its rather pedestrian human underpinnings.

    Fresh out of college, Sam (Shia LaBeouf) discovers that the evil Decepticons are preparing to strike the heroic Autobots with the use of a mysterious technology hidden on an Autobot ship that crash-landed on the moon 50 years ago. With the assistance of his beautiful new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Sam teams up with the Autobots to fight their robot enemies, whose plan involves bringing their home planet into Earth’s orbit and enslaving the human race.

    “Dark of the Moon” is the first “Transformers” movie to feature 3D, and considering reports that more than half of the film was shot in 3D (as opposed to retrofitted after the fact), this sci-fi action movie is indeed a high-water mark for the technology, making superb use of the extra dimension without compromising much in terms of overall image brightness or quality. Unfortunately, the technical achievements, including predictably stunning special effects, do nothing to help Bay’s glaring limitations as a storyteller.

    Though Ehren Kruger’s screenplay starts off with a clever premise — the 1960s space race was actually an attempt to learn about the mysterious Autobot ship buried on the moon — soon “Dark of the Moon” becomes the exact same unwieldy combination of corny humor, over-the-top heroics, sappy romantic interludes, and bombastic melodrama that made the first two movies in the series so lumbering.

    At over two-and-a-half-hours, “Dark of the Moon” is almost 10 minutes longer than either of the other “Transformers” movies, and once again Bay seems to feel that the extended running time justifies a pumped-up gravitas that the story’s thin emotional resonance can’t begin to justify.

    LaBeouf has a winning nerdiness that can be appealing, but characters matter less as flesh-and-blood entities in the world of Transformers than they do as dramatic props that can run and yell amidst booming explosions. Bay has never seemed terribly invested in Sam, and so LaBeouf’s attempts to make the young man’s adventures a sort of coming-of-age tale feel hopelessly pointless.

    But LaBeouf is far from the only mediocre performance in “Dark of the Moon.” Replacing Megan Fox, model Huntington-Whiteley (making her acting debut) is treated as a cynical sex object in ways that even Fox didn’t have to endure. When Bay isn’t shooting her as if she’s the sleek auto in a car commercial, Huntington-Whiteley is left to her own devices, which leaves the novice looking very uncomfortable, particularly when Carly is put in mortal danger throughout the film’s second half.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

    (SD-Agencies)