Michael Bay Promises Less “Dorky Comedy” in Transformers 3

You know what? I might get blasted for writing this, but I’m actually starting to get excited for Transformers 3. Although I’ll sorely miss Megan Fox, who was ousted from the third film and replaced by Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely, it seems to me like director Michael Bay is actually trying to make the third film in this franchise a lot better than its abysmal predecessor, 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Granted, that could be accomplished simply by including a plot that A) makes sense and B) doesn’t overtly try to insult the audience’s intelligence at every turn, but when it comes to giant robots and explosions, I try to think positively.

According to a recent USA Today story, Bay and his team fully acknowledge that Revenge of the Fallen simply wasn’t as good as the first film, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit as a piece of light summer movie entertainment.

“I’ll take some of the criticism,” Bay said. “It was very hard to put [the sequel] together that quickly after the writers’ strike [of 2007-08].”

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura added, “We tried to do too many things in the second movie, which didn’t give enough time in any one of them. We were constantly jumping to the next piece of information, the next place.”

One of the things Bay is intensely focused on this time around is toning down what he calls “the dorky humor” of the last film, specifically the blatantly offensive racial caricatures Mudflap and Skids, who all too often turned the film into a big-budget minstrel show. “They’re basically gone,” he said.

Bay revealed to USA Today that the main villain this time around will be Shockwave, the cycloptic, Generation 1 Decepticon tyrant who transforms into a giant laser gun, and that the film will somehow tie into the space race between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

“The movie is more of a mystery,” Bay said of his third and presumably final Transformers film. “It ties in what we know as history growing up as kids with what really happened.”

Transformers 3 hits theaters July 1, 2011.