Is there a word missing from this film title? If so, it may spring from a blunder of astronomical proportions ...
Sadly, there are those who've found something lacking in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Still, never mind the movie: what about that title? You don't have to be a Pink Floyd junkie to notice that a rather important word seems to have gone awol.
The 'dark of the moon' is a three-day period at the end of the lunar cycle when the moon isn't visible from Earth. Psychics consider this a great time to receive messages from the soul, and in primitive matriarchal cultures it's the moment to head for the menstruation hut. However, none of that has any bearing on anything that happens in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Indeed, the dark of the moon doesn't even get a mention.
What the characters do keep prattling on about is the dark 'side' of the moon. As indeed they must, since this is the location for the film's seminal events. This is where Sentinel Prime crashes a Cybertronian spacecraft loaded with galactically momentous cargo. It's where the Apollo 11 astronauts go to check out the wreck, and whither Optimus hastens to rescue his one-time mentor. So it looks as if the word 'side' should have been in the title but somehow got left out.
When you spend a couple of years making and marketing a $200m movie, you surely don't get its name wrong by mistake. So what's up? In the absence of an explanation from the film-makers, speculation has understandably been rife.
The URL transformersdarksideofthemoon.com was registered at some point. Apparently it used to redirect to michaelbay.com. Perhaps even more mysteriously, it has now ceased to do so. Other clues also suggest the word 'side' was originally meant to be up there. The Spanish title is still El Lado Oscuro de la Luna. So why did the word disappear from the English-language version?
Among the welter of theories, the one favoured by most scholars (including our own Peter Bradshaw) lays the blame on Pink Floyd. The band's surviving members are presumed to have bullied Paramount into changing the title to enforce their supposed copyright, or to have demanded a royalty sufficiently excessive to make even a Hollywood giant baulk.
Well, Floydsters have been known to resort to litigation, but only to lay claim to the name of their own band, not that of one half of our nearest celestial body. Floyd didn't invent the expression 'dark side of the moon', and any claim to own it would be unlikely to have impressed a top studio's lawyers. Since the Floyd album appeared in 1973, at least two films have already borne the same title, not to speak of a video game, at least three novels and a whole bunch of songs.
Yet few of the other suggestions so far advanced seem much more convincing. The least fanciful is that the change was simply a bid to be more succinct. Still, if such was the ambition, why not just settle for Transformers 3?
Naturally, your correspondent asked Paramount. But by the time of going to press, no answer had come. In the circumstances, perhaps that's not surprising. Anyway, this column's duty is now clear: it must offer a theory of its own. Here goes.
Director Michael Bay knew he faced an awkward challenge. A third helping of mindless metallic mayhem must have threatened to be a bit of a bore, even to him. What was to be done? Why, this time he could invest the proceedings with a bit of romance, menace and magic. How? He could co-opt a real-world phenomenon that has always enthralled and unnerved. He would initiate his action in an eerie place that's perpetually dark, perpetually cold and condemned to rotate endlessly around our planet forever out of our sight. A place that many believe has already played host to real alien incursions.
Bay's team applauded enthusiastically and set to work on a film that would obviously need to be called Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. Everyone was thrilled. Everyone, that is, except one geeky intern. For in this lowly youngster's head a horrible doubt was taking shape. Mindful of Megan Fox's fate, he kept his counsel long into the months of postproduction. Finally, however, he could stay silent no longer.
At a tidying-up meeting, he raised his wavering hand. We have a problem, he said, a big one. The basis for our film's supposed charisma doesn't actually exist: there's no such place as the dark side of the moon.
After a moment of appalled silence, he explained. It's true that because tidal forces have slowed the moon's rotation, one of its hemispheres is permanently turned away from us. But the moon gets its light from the sun, not the earth. So the far side gets just as much light as the side we can see. The whole idea of a 'dark side' of the moon is rooted in a centuries-old misconception.
The room resounded with curses from all present. If they just went ahead as planned, would anyone notice their howler? Of course they would. That Guardian column, Between the Lines, would be on to it in a jiffy. The whole franchise would become a laughing stock.
What could be done? There was no time to reshoot all the scenes in which that 'dark' side got a mention. The whole thing looked hopeless. Then someone came up with a desperate ploy. Just drop the fateful word from the title: that way, sneerers might be thrown off the scent. Regrettably, the plan doesn't seem to have worked.
Instead, all that happened was that the title became a mess. Some might say this makes it well suited to the film itself. But that would be unkind.
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