While the relentless, inflated bombast of cinematographer Amir Mokri's images and Steve Jablonsky's score indeed suggest a self-mocking blend of surrealism and underground film, Ehren Kruger's screenplay is more like a mashup of every possible Hollywood story ingredient. "Dark of the Moon" is a little bit "X Files" and "X-Men" and "Watchmen" and "Men in Black," a little bit "Meet the Parents," a little bit every one of the 873 movies where the doofy hero has an inexplicably hot girlfriend and has to keep her away from a richer and better-looking guy, and way too much of "Lord of the Rings," with LaBeouf as Frodo and his yellow Mustang Transformer sidekick Bumblebee as Sam....
I couldn't decide whether Nimoy's presence pissed me off or was oddly ingratiating, but either way it's part of Bay's own evil plan, which is to absorb all existing pop-culture science fiction universes -- Lucas, Tolkien, "The Matrix," "Star Trek," probably "Babylon 5" and "Space: 1999" -- and subjugate them to his stupid robots.
Usually these attempts by critics to be clever fail miserably, but the rough-and-tumble nearly-stream-of-conscious outpouring here somehow makes it work.
