TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON: Is Sam Witwicky the Most Useless Lead Character in Sci-Fi History?

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) – Directed by Michael Bay, Starring Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving, Leonard Nimoy, Charlie Adler, and James Remar.

To answer the question posed in the title of this review: Probably not. On another day I might spend hours combing my Blu-ray and DVD collection, soliciting feedback, and perusing IMDB to try to find a worse lead character, but today I don’t have the time or the inclination to be bothered splitting hairs. After watching DARK OF THE MOON last night, I’ve struggled to find anything useful that Sam Witwicky brings to this installment of the Michael Bay TRANSFORMERS trilogy and I can’t come up with anything. He is a dreadful lead character sitting in the middle of a perfectly fine CGI orgy.

As he enters the film, we discover that Sam (Shia LeBeouf) has been dumped by Megan Fox and is now shacking up with Carly Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) in Washington, DC. He hates his life because he’s been out of college for three months and doesn’t have a job, yet. He’s mad because he’s saved the world a couple times and he can’t tell anyone and the government won’t help him find gainful employment. Carly doesn’t care about any of this, though. She loves Sam enough to buy him a lucky bunny rabbit and pay all of the rent. Sam doesn’t care about that, though, because all he wants to do is b*tch and moan about how awful his life has turned out to be since he, you know, saved the world a couple times.

Plus, his parents are coming to town! In a week! And if he doesn’t have a job by then, well, you know how parents are!

Ugh.

This basically goes on throughout the entire movie – Sam whines, Sam complains, Sam cops a bad attitude, Sam gets possessive with his girlfriend, Sam plays big man because he knows he’s a little man. It’s … so … tedious.

Watching DARK OF THE MOON it’s easy to see that the TRANSFORMERS story has progressed beyond the Sam Witwicky character. As much as Sam complains about not having an important life and being left behind as the Autobots play nice with the military, the truth is that the overall story really has left him behind. Michael Bay and his scriptwriters have done nothing to make us think Sam Witwicky even needs to be in this movie. DARK OF THE MOON is a military movie, and would have been much better served with Josh Duhamel taking over lead acting duties. Lt. Colonel William Lennox is smart, assured, in a command position, and, oh yeah, works with the Autobots every flipping day as a high ranking officer in NEST, which apparently stands for Networked Elements: Supporters and Transformers.

Honestly. Someone got paid to come up with that.

When Sam is on screen, DARK OF THE MOON grinds to a halt. There’s a whole subplot with him, Carly, and Carly’s boss, Dylan (Patrick Dempsey) that only gets mildly interesting when Dylan is revealed as being the Decepticons’ human liaison in their attempt to take over the world. Before this reveal, Dylan exists as a character just to make Sam look small. And Sam obliges by looking and acting small. Instead of being super appreciative of his girlfriend for being with him, he gets all jealous, which makes him even whinier and more insecure. We don’t need this angle; or if we’re going to get this angle we don’t need the “Sam can’t get a job” angle, because it doubles down on the lamest aspect of the movie. It’s almost like everyone got a blind spot with Sam and forgot this is a popcorn flick and not a male parody of Jane Austen. Dempsey is perfectly fine in the film; while not as extraordinarily gifted actor, he can handle fastballs in his zone and that’s what DARK OF THE MOON asks him to do. Casting is so much about finding the right actor for the right role, about knowing what an actor can do and what a role requires and then finding a perfect match.

Which leads us to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Because she’s a model with no prior acting experience (Bay apparently worked with her on a Victoria’s Secret advertisement), and because Michael Bay is a pervert, I’m required at this point to say something about her looks and inability to act. When DARK OF THE MOON was originally released, I remember some magazine (Entertainment Weekly, I believe), making at dig at her by saying she was Bay’s new robot or something, and while she’s not a very good actor, DARK OF THE MOON doesn’t require very good actors. John Malkovich is in the film, but it’s not exactly like they’re asking him to do Dostoyevsky. Huntington-Whiteley is supposed to be Sam’s hot girlfriend who her boss is trying to sleep with, and she does that well enough with that. (She has a sort of blank look on her face that I don’t find overly attractive, but she does have a British accent, which helps. You get the feeling, though, that Bay cast her just for her opening scene where his camera lingers on her legs and ass.) It’s not like the four or five scenes where she’s required to bring emotion to the role are going to make or break the film, after all.

The problem with her character is just that she’s sort of pointless to the main plot. Just like Sam is sort of pointless. DARK OF THE MOON would have been an infinitely better film if this whole Sam/Carly/Dylan subplot was not here and the focus was kept on the characters who get name-dropped in the title.

You know, the TRANSFORMERS.

There’s a reason why the film isn’t called SAM WITWICKY: HE NEVER STOPS WHINING.

I really hate the way Sam treats Carly. When a Decepticon kills a worker (Ken Jeong) at the job Sam gets thanks to Dylan, he jams Carly in his car and hauls over to the top secret NEST base in DC. She wants to know what’s what and why he’s freaking and he basically tells her, “Sit there and shut up.”

I’m sure the decision was made to keep Sam in the film because he was so central to the first film and such a big part of the sequel, but he’s just not needed in this one. Perhaps if they’d made him part of NEST, with a job he wasn’t allowed to tell his girlfriend about, there would be a reason for his nervousness when it came to Carly and her super-rich, playboy boss. As the film plays out, though, Sam is either an annoyance or in the way.

When DARK OF THE MOON sticks with the Transformers and the military, it’s a pretty good action picture. It still annoys the hell out of me that they make all of the Transformers look awfully indistinguishable when they’re in robot mode. It’s literally like someone gets paid a dollar for every single, separate part they can jam onto the robots. They might look reasonably cool in a still frame, but when they start moving around, it’s just a bunch of flashy metal and brief flashes of paint.

I dig the Transformers plot in the film. During the big war on Cybertron, Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy) piloted a craft with super technology and it gets blown up and crashes onto the moon. This is the “secret history” that led to the Apollo program. Flash forward to the future and Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) finally finds out about all this after an incident in Russia, which introduces us to Shockwave (Frank Welker), and goes and rescues Sentinel. After bringing him back to life, the seen-it-coming-a-million-miles-away twist of Sentinel’s betrayal happens and then there’s plenty of awesome robot action.

The sequence in Russia with Optimus and Shockwave is pretty great. The highway chase scene is pretty great. Sentinel’s betrayal is pretty great. The storming of Chicago is pretty great.

The problem with all of this, however, is that the film doesn’t have enough faith in the Transformers plot without adding in all of this human junk. Megatron (Hugo Weaving) is basically an afterthought. It’s like they forgot that the main reason there is a Transformers movie is because of the Transformers. Did they even make a Sam Witwicky action figure back in the day? Whose favorite moment from the cartoon involves Sam being a whiny, self-entitled punk? Sam is so useless and so annoying that he just gets in the way. Michael Bay also brings back John Turturro’s annoying secret agent Simmons, though thankfully he’s toned down the craziness. He has perhaps the best line of the film, too, when he says to Sam, “Years from now they’re gonna ask where were you when they took over the planet? And we’re gonna say we just watched.”

I’ll give Bay credit, too, for making this film feel like an ending. While these movies have never really felt like a proper trilogy, the final action sequence feels like it’s a final battle. Optimus is in total take-no-sh*t mode, insisting the Autobots “will kill them all.” He personally takes out both Megatron and Sentinel. I could have watched two hours of the storming of Chicago instead of just an hour. This is where the film really takes off, where it gives Sam something useful to do, rescuing Carly and storming the city with Epps (Tyrese Gibson). Epps sets the tone for the second half. No longer a part of NEST, he tells Sam he’s going with him. When Sam asks why, Epps tells him, “These assh*les killed my friends, too.”

I mean, yeah. Turn this bad boy into a Western and we’re getting somewhere. Sam and Epps, NEST, the return of the Autobots … this is good stuff. This is popcorn entertainment at a really high level.

Unfortunately, having to sit through all of that Sam junk in the first half is like a movie theater refusing to give you your popcorn without first reading you all of the nutritional information and forcing you to eat spinach before you can have your snack.

I can’t believe this is the last TRANSFORMERS film, though. This franchise simply makes too much money. I wouldn’t even be opposed to Michael Bay coming back, but it’s time to let the Transformers take over their own franchise, become more well-rounded characters, and dump the Witwicky kid. Or at least give him something useful to do. DARK OF THE MOON doesn’t reach the heights of the first TRANSFORMERS movie, but it is a big improvement on REVENGE OF THE FALLEN.

AVATAR: James Cameron’s Racial F*ck You to George Lucas & Michael Bay

Avatar (2009) – Directed by James Cameron – Starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Joel David Moore, and Giovanni Ribisi.

Or: James Cameron Hates America, Watto, Skids, Mudflap, and George W. Bush.

Where George Lucas gave us racist stereotypes dressed as cartoonish aliens (in PHANTOM MENACE) and Michael Bay gave us racist stereotypes dressed as robots (TRANSFORMERS 2), I spent the first hour of AVATAR worried that James Cameron was simply giving us racist stereotypes dressed up as really tall Smurfs. Cameron clearly traffics in the historical waters and cultural weight of American racism, but it’s far too easy to racially dismiss AVATAR as “Dances with CGI” and condemn Cameron for making another “White People Make Better Indians than Indians” movie. There’s more going on here.

While AVATAR qualifies as neither a great film nor an enlightening film, Cameron doesn’t go the Lucas/Bay route and CGI-up stereotypes so we can continue to laugh at such racist Hollywood favorites as the big-nosed, money-pinching Jew (as Lucas does with Watto) or the gold-tooth wearing, shucking and jiving inner city black kid (as Bay does with Skids and Mudflap). Instead, Cameron turns American Indians blue in order to both evaluate our contemporary ability to use technology to put on an avatar and change our visual identity, and to offer an environmental critique of contemporary American politics, capitalism, and the military.

Frankly, it’s sort of a stunning attempt from a brilliant visual director who tends to make rather dumb movies.

James Cameron makes big movies and often emotional movies but he doesn’t make very smart movies; there’s not a lot of moral ambiguity in the Cameron-verse, where there are usually clearly drawn good guys and clearly drawn bad guys shooting at each other to create awesome looking explosions. Nothing illustrates this more than the switch of the Schwarzenegger T-800 being a bad guy in one movie and a good guy in the next simply by reprogramming it; Cameron cares far less about the journey as he does the destination.

Even in AVATAR, Jake Sully has basically one scene where he’s conflicted about what he’s doing. First, he’s a spy whose firmly on the side of the company, then he’s conflicted about who he is, then he lies to his Colonel so he can keep being blue, and then he wants to be blue all the time.

And then Cameron spends two hours blowing cartoon shit up cooler than anyone else can blow cartoon shit up.

AVATAR is, pretty plainly, a cowboys and indians movie where the cowboy “goes native” and ends up fighting against the system that produced him, and the film does fall into the racialist trap of having Jake often make a better Na’vi than the Na’vi themselves make: he’s not only chosen by the Na’vi’s god as being special but he manages to tame the big red flying dinosaur thing that only five other Na’vi have ever done in the entire history of their people.

So, yeah, there’s that, and Cameron doesn’t get a pass for falling into that trap.

That said, Cameron doesn’t simply repackage the Hollywood Indian as blue aliens just so we can continue to traffic in the same old racial stereotypes; that is, unlike Lucas and Bay, Cameron doesn’t offer the stereotype as a source of derision or for our amusement, but so he can critique contemporary American culture as one that has lost its way.

Or maybe one that never really had the right way to begin with.

What sets AVATAR apart, too, is the totality of its condemnation. At the heart of AVATAR resides a rejection not only of a military, capitalist, genocidal approach to dealing with another culture, but of racial paternalism. When the Na’vi accept Jake’s avatar into their culture, we learn that he gets an inside pass that Sigourney Weaver and the scientists haven’t received, either, and they’re clearly the good humans in contrast to the evil company/military variety.

The Na’vi, in short, have not only rejected the “Sky People’s” military but their scientists who think of the Na’vi and Pandora simply as biological parts to study, and treat them, in their own way, as stupid savages that need to be taught the human way in human schools in order for the Na’vi to get out of the corporation’s way. When Jake becomes hybridized as a human soul in a Na’vi body, he’s really hybridized as being a military creation living inside a scientific creation, and it’s this hybridization that leads to the Na’vi accepting them into their midst.

The Na’vi god, then, seems to see that change is coming and that the Na’vi must learn to navigate this change in order for them to survive. It’s not that they must lose their culture, or have their culture assimilated into an American way of life, but that they can learn from Jake in order to defend themselves. They need to be open to an outsider’s way in order to defeat the outsiders, so while Jake is sent into Pandora to spy on the Na’vi, the Na’vi god seems to want the Na’vi people to bring Jake in so they can use him, too.

Honestly, AVATAR isn’t really suggesting that Jake makes a better Na’vi than any Na’vi does at all, but that he holds a uniquely qualified ability to become the specific military leader they need against this specific military threat. The Na’vi need to learn to teach him how to be one of them so he can become that military leader they need. Nearly all of the “Na’vi ways” that he’s taught end up having a specific military benefit: riding Pandoran horses and dinobirds, shooting with a bow and arrow, and connecting with the big, light-up tree all end up playing a vital role in the big battle. I’m not going to claim that the Na’vi god or high priestess intends for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) to sex him to help turn him against the humans and keep him loyal to the Na’vi, but I’m not saying they’re all that surprised, either.

Importantly, too, while Jake may get to do a few things better than the Na’vi, and while he gets the credit for leading the troops into victory, it’s Neytiri who saves him at the end. She saves him twice, in fact – first saving his avatar from the Colonel and then saving his human form from oxygen starvation.

Ultimately, the stereotypical trap that AVATAR not only doesn’t fall into but outright rejects is the “vanishing Indian” myth. In the typical “white man makes a better Indian than the Indians do” story, whatever victory is accomplished by the white man’s cultural shift is soaked in sorrow because we know how it all ends – it’s a victory in battle but not in war.

Because AVATAR CGIs reality into fantasy it can offer a real victory. The environmentally conscious aliens can defeat the big industrial power, allowing Cameron’s repackaged racial fantasy to resonate with a hopefulness about a nation finding a better way to move forward through inclusion rather than genocide. It’s not so much about finding people who look like you, but finding a shared ideology. When Jake and the Colonel have their final throwdown and the Colonel asks Jake how it feels to betray his race, we can already see that the question is the wrong one.

Cameron’s message in AVATAR really isn’t about “going native” as much as it about a nation rejecting the ideals of Bush and the Neocons, who have highjacked an already imperfect American ideology with its preemptive “shock and awe” approach to dealing with those who are different from us, who seek to destroy what they fear but do not understand.

There’s something to be said, too, for the manner in which this identity transformation takes place. While the film does embarrass itself by taking the “you can tell I’m siding with the natives because I’m wearing war paint” route, the transformation of Jake from human to Na’vi is achieved through the transference of his consciousness into a lab-built Na’vi body, but he needs to learn about Na’vi culture before the avatar is anything but a false face. In this regard, Cameron is making a technological critique about the dangers of identity hopping – just because you can look the part doesn’t mean you can understand the part.

It’ll be interesting to see how AVATAR ages. The big CGI sequences (which make up the bulk of the film) are really a sight to behold but the story is a bit simple and predictable. Cameron the Writer offers too much hack and ham throughout the film, which will hurt AVATAR as the CGI that dazzles us today becomes commonplace tomorrow.

I’m not really a huge Cameron fan, either, though I usually enjoy his movies the first time around. Technical whiz that he is, I only think one Cameron movie qualifies as a true cinematic masterpiece (ALIENS), while only two others (ABYSS and TITANIC) ever draw me back in for repeated viewings. His Schwarzenegger Trilogy (TERMINATOR, T2, and TRUE LIES) has aged as well as old milk.

Heck, even his TV show was only visionary in being the first of many Jessica Alba projects to bore us to tears.

AVATAR just might be the rare Cameron movie that gets better as it gets older, however, and as discussion of the film starts digging beneath the surface to examine the themes and issues at play here, AVATAR might be seen as a film that’s more than just a landmark effects film. Dismissing AVATAR as an empty spectacle is as much a mistake as dismissing it simply because he turns Indians blue.

Cameron really is trying to give us a story here, and he’s trying to offer social commentary, and he’s trying to have a real environmental consciousness, and he’s trying – whether it’s the conflict between industry and environment, or the conflict between two different cultures – to suggest that we can still move forward as we hold onto who we are.

I give him credit for that. James Cameron isn’t so much an old dog learning new tricks as he is an old dog learning new philosophy. You can knock him for not having all the answers, yet, or for relying on a few too many Hollywood tropes better left behind, but unlike the bulk of his characters, Cameron seems to finally have figured out that the journey is every bit as important as the destination. It’s gonna be interesting to see where the AVATAR story goes from here.