Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

If Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen becomes the biggest movie of the summer, and possibly the year, as many are expecting, then we have lowered our standards a great deal in a short time. Just last summer, The Dark Knight reigned supreme. It was smart, it was suspenseful, it was thrilling, it was funny, and it was exciting - all qualities Transformers lacks. This is a joyless and bloated spectacle that not only contains everything that is wrong with big budget spectacles today, but also killed my desire to watch anymore for the rest of the summer. And June's not even over yet...

The movie is sure to have its defenders. They'll refer to it as "popcorn entertainment", or "junk food for the brain". I agree to an extent. The movie is most certainly junk food for the mind. My problem lies with the fact that this is an overindulgence of brain junk. Director Michael Bay has given us a two and a half hour sensory overload that is the cinematic equivalent of eating 25 Big Macs one after another - Both leave you feeling guilty and sick to your stomach when they're over. There is not a moment in this movie where someone is not screaming, something is not exploding or being shot at, and the sound of scraping metal or the booming, overly dramatic soundtrack is not bombarding us on the speakers. The whole experience left me feeling numb and weary. The defenders will also point out that the movie was made for kids. I don't buy that for a minute. The movie is filled with sexual references and innuendo. Plus, the way that returning heroine, Mikaela (Megan Fox), is shot in some scenes, you'd think Bay was making a soft core porno film. The first time we see her, she's draped sensually over a motorcycle, the camera centered on her tight shorts.

Of course, nothing I say here will keep people away. 2007's Transformers wasn't much better than this, and still went on to make a fortune. But it still had a small sense of wonder to it. We were seeing the Transformers in live action for the first time. Sure, they could have been handled a lot better, but it was still thrilling to see childhood icons like Optimus Prime come to life, and wonderful to hear that Peter Cullen (the original voice of Prime on the cartoon I grew up with) still sounded the same after all these years. All the robots from the first movie are back, and there are a bunch of new ones too, though very few actually have anything to do with the movie itself other than to increase the film's special effect budget. The main problem I had with the first film returns also, in that aside from a few key robots, I had a hard time distinguishing them. The evil Decepticons in particular look almost exactly alike for the most part. The screenplay by Ehren Kruger (Blood and Chocolate), and returning writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (2009's Star Trek), compensates by giving the robot characters personalities that are just as interchangeable as their appearance, for the most part. Aside from noble Prime, faithful Bumblebee, and odious comic robot sidekicks Mudflap (Reno Wilson) and Skids (Tom Kenny), very few of the robots actually stand out in the jumbled mess that is the plot.

So, what of the plot anyway? Best I can gather from the shrieking pile that is this movie, an ancient and evil Decepticon who is simply referred to as the Fallen (voice by Tony Todd) came to Earth in the prehistoric days, and was defeated by some ancient weapon. Flash forward to the present, and our young returning hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is looking forward to going to college and leading a normal life, after spending the past two years dealing with giant alien robots from distant worlds. That's not gonna happen, obviously. Sam has something that the Decepticons want to revive both the Fallen, and their leader Megatron (voice by Hugo Weaving), who sank at the bottom of the sea at the end of the last movie. Sam must once again team up with the heroic Optimus Prime and his Autobots, who are now working for the government to secretly destroy any Decepticon threat. (Although seeing that they lay waste to most of Shanghai in the film's opening action sequence, I wonder how this "top secret" government division remains so.) With their evil leaders revived, the Decepticons ultimately plan to take over the world, and destroy the Earth's sun with the aid of an ancient weapon buried in the Egyptian pyramids.

The plot of Transformers relies heavily on coincidences, contrivances, and inconsistencies. The Decepticons are only as strong as the screenplay allows. Sometimes, Megatron is strong enough to rip an ocean liner in half, and sometimes he seems to be kept at bay by human gunfire. Sometimes the Transformers themselves are towering and impressive, standing stories above the human actors, and sometimes their entire bodies seem to fit in the same frame as the humans without any problem. Add to the fact that a majority of the robots literally look like walking junk piles with eyes (blue for the heroic Autobots, red for the evil Decepticons), and it's very disappointing, especially when you consider how much money was spent on the effects alone. They fill each frame of the movie, but they're not interesting to look at. It's CG clutter that is convincingly added to the live action, but still never manages to come to life in any way. Most of the robots also talk in urban slang, and have New York accents. The twin comic relief robots, despite hailing from a distant alien world, talk in cliched "black ghetto" speak, display gold teeth, and seem to have picked up on Hollywood's worst cliches. If giant alien robots from another world came to visit us, you would hope they would have more to say than one liners like "Damn, I'm good", and "Punk-ass Decepticon...".

Am I old fashioned for wanting things like interesting characters to go with my summer movie junk food? Or the slightest resemblance of an idea or creativity? This movie certainly makes me feel so. This is $200 million worth of budget vomited onto a screen, while an editor vainly tried to make sense of it all. No one says or does anything of the slightest interest or importance. The human actors are generally required to yell things like "look out", or explain the plot with forced enthusiasm, as if they think the audience is here for the plot and not the giant robots that will be added in after they go home when the shoot is over. They're also required to run away from explosions in slow motion, which I think this movie holds a new record for in terms of the number of times it's used. Heck, there's even a shot of two dogs who were previously humping each other running away from an exploding house. (Wether it was in slow motion or not, I don't remember.) The whole experience quickly becomes mind numbing. The movie can't seem to go five minutes without a chase, a shootout, or someone yelling their dialogue at the highest volume the theater's speaker can muster. All this noise, I'm guessing, is to hide the fact that very little happens during a majority of the movie's middle portion.

Revenge of the Fallen will make money. It will be hailed as one of the big box office draws of the year. It will sell toys, fast food promotions, and video game tie-ins by the truckload, all but ensuring I'll be reviewing Transformers 3 before too long. What it will never be is a good movie. I imagine it won't even be looked back on very fondly come a few years from now, and will join the ranks of other summer blockbusters that have fallen out of favor over time, like Independence Day. I can accept the fact that the movie is dumb, and exists solely to sell toys. I knew that walking in. But why couldn't it have been fun, too? That's all I was asking for. The movie is big and dumb alright, but it most certainly is not fun.

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