Yesterday, nearly two years to the day after going to see Michael Bay’s first “Transformers” film, Rick and I once again channelled our inner 12-year olds, did our best to turn off our brains, and headed off to see “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”.
My original summary of the first “Transformers” was:
Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.
Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”
I can quite easily update that for this sequel, with just a couple brief changes:
Mini-review number one: It was incredibly over-the-top, in-your-face, bad.
Mini-review number two: Moments of mild amusement buried in a whole mess of WTF.
Admittedly, after seeing the first and reading some of the reviews of this one, I wasn’t laboring under any illusions of what I was walking in to. Mainly, Rick and I wanted to go because we’d gone together to the first one, we new it would be bad…and we knew we’d have a lot of fun suffering through it. Mock me if you wish, but I doubt we’re the only two people out there who’ve done such a thing!
Actual reviews of the movie have been handled far more ably than I’m likely to do. Here’s a few choice quotes from three of my favorites. First, from Roger Ebert‘s official review:
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
Second, and again from Roger Ebert, his blog entry The Fall of the Revengers:
The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.
[…]
The term Assault on the Senses has become a cliché. It would be more accurate to describe the film simply as “painful.” The volume is cranked way up, probably on studio instructions, and the sound track consists largely of steel crashing discordantly against steel. Occasionally a Bot voice will roar thunderingly out of the left-side speakers, (1) reminding us of Surround Sound, or (2) reminding the theater to have the guy take another look at those right-side speakers. Beneath that is boilerplate hard-pounding action music, alternating with deep bass voices intoning what sounds like Gregorian chant without the Latin, or maybe even without the words: Just apprehensive sounds, translating as Oh, no! No! These Decepticons® are going to steal the energy of the sun and destroy the Earth!
Lastly, from io9’s brilliant review by Charlie Jane Anders:
Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.
If I haven’t bored you enough already, what follows are a few things that stuck out to me during and after the film. Mostly bad, of course, but there were one or two things that I actually liked….
- Judging by the way Sam’s mom behaves after eating a single pot brownie as they’re dropping Sam off at college — because she’s so dim and so disconnected with the world around her that she doesn’t realize what she’s eating even when there’s a picture of a pot leaf on the baggie — it seems that Michael Bay’s only experience with or knowledge of the effects of pot comes from scare films of the 50’s and 60’s like “Reefer Madness”. She gets extremely loopy, runs around campus gleefully telling girls to go up to Sam’s room, tackles students playing frisbee on the lawn, and generally makes a total ass of herself, acting far more like she’s jazzed on some form of serious uppers than on any form of pot. It’s rather sad, too, as her character was one of the few things I liked about the first film.
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During Sam and Optimus Prime’s conversation in the graveyard, I had to stifle my laughter as Prime kept striking a classic “hero pose” during his lines. Even though he’s 40 feet tall and having a conversation with a maybe-six-foot teenager, rather than looking at Sam, he keeps standing tall, putting his fists on his hips, and staring off up into the sky somewhere as he orates about the great destiny before Sam and how important he is.
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The college girl who suddenly is revealed to be a Transformer (which raises a whole host of questions, not least of which is what happens to all the soft, curvy, fleshy bits when she transforms into her robot form) really looked like a ripoff of Sil from Species (Google Images link, potentially NSFW).
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Whether or not it was intentional, I had to laugh at the ironic subtext of Michael Bay taking a few minutes to blow the crap out of a college library. What better imagery can there be in a Bay film than destroying a repository of literature meant to educate and inform the mind?
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The Autobot ‘twins’ were horrendous, going beyond racial stereotyping into racist stereotyping. Sure, they were animated robots, but they were also obvious inner city street trash, in everything from behavior to accent and slang to facial features exaggerated to the point of looking like a robotic minstrel show. Disturbing and sad.
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Wait, Transformers can transport? Just like magic, poof, suddenly they’re in Egypt, with no real coherent explanation or reason, aside than it let Bay make another crazy quick-cut.
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So much unnecessary and, to my mind, unfunny stupid lower-than-lowbrow humor, from the dogs humping each other to the robot humping Megan Fox’s leg to Turturro’s jock strap to the wrecking ball ‘scrotum’ of Devastator.
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Wait, they brought in Jetfire? The original Jetfire was my all-time favorite Transformer, so realizing that they’d put him in the film was actually kind of cool. And, I’ll admit, they did a better job on his design than some: though they changed him to an SR-71 Blackbird, they kept more of the Blackbird’s signature look in his robot form. The ‘beard’ seemed a little silly for a robot, but overall, one of the better designs in these films.
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One of the things I didn’t like about the first film was how confusing the fight scenes were:
I kept wanting to scream at the screen and tell Bay to back up about 50 yards or so. I assume he’s trying for a very “you are there” style, but by constantly putting his camera all of ten feet away from any action, you can’t really see anything. You end up figuring out what’s going on by the surrounding establishing shots — sort of like figuring out an unfamiliar word by the context of what’s around it. You don’t really know if you understand, but you’re pretty sure you’ve at least got a good vague idea of what it should be.
This time, there were a couple of sequences where Bay seemed to listen to that particular criticism, and pulled back to let us get a better view of the action. That turned out to be a mixed bag — it was easier to see what was going on…but it was also more apparent just how silly it looked to have these huge robots banging on each other. Kind of a mixed bag on that one, as it turned out.
So, all in all, that’s it — one big incoherent mess of explosions, screaming, explosions, lowest-common-denominator jokes, explosions, and…oh, yeah, explosions.
What really blows my mind about all this is that not one, but both Transformers films were written by Orci and Kurtzman, the same team behind the recent Star Trek film. I’d either expect Star Trek to have been far worse (which was one of my worries) or the Transformers films to be much better, but…well, we got what we got. I’ll just blame it all on Michael Bay.