Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — Damn You Michael Bay! A New Summer Cinema Low.

Posted by ScuzzBuster

June 30, 2009

t1onesheet I believe that it may be in my best interests to forfeit my official position of being a mild Michael Bay apologist. Now I’m not completely bonkers, I’m not ranting on talkbacks about how he’s been snubbed for best director Oscars or anything, but the man is an entertainer. When he makes a film his number one goal is to do whatever he can to entertain the audience. Armageddon’s worst crime was not to moviegoers, it was to anyone with a basic knowledge of science. Other than that, I had a fun time with Armageddon. How often do you get to see Bruce Willis explode? With that out of the way, let me say that Michael Bay did not entertain me this weekend.

For an adult male of prime Transformers age, I never watched a lick of it when the rest of my classmates were watching it. Actually, I was just heading into my freshman year of high school when the show hit it’s peak and I could have cared less about it. I was all about Star Trek, Doctor Who, Monty Python and finally coming to terms 5 years after the fact that Return of the Jedi wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

t2-4 Still, I was actually hyped about Bay’s first Transformers flick. I mean, even if the rest of it was mediocre, who doesn’t like giant fighting robots? How could that not be cool? And it was. The only thing that drove me up the wall about the first Transformers film was Shia, who not only did I think was simply awful in that role, but his character was so outlandishly immature and childish that it was completely unbelievable that any even remotely hot chic would give him the time of day, much less be his “girlfriend.” Thank God she did though, because without a few glimpses of Megan Fox’s skin, Revenge of the Fallen may have not had much else to offer. I’ve softened on Shia in the years hence, especially after he turned out to actually be one of the highlights of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. All that time I was so worried about Shia being Indy’s son I should have simply been worried about George Lucas having any creative input into that film.

tform1986 Shortly after I saw and kind of dug Bay’s first Transformers flick, a coworker loaned me the DVD of the 1986 animated Transformers movie. He worshipped the flick just as I know many men in their late 20s and early 30s do today. I anxiously took it home on a Friday night and booted the DVD up on a lazy Saturday afternoon…and didn’t understand a minute of it. It was beyond my meager comprehension to understand what the hell was going on or what in the slightest was entertaining about it beyond Weird Al being on the soundtrack. I was underwhelmed.

t2-5 Skip ahead to 2009. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was to be the more colorful of two summer films that promised to bring us huge exploding robots, the first being Terminator Salvation. That was strike 1.
Strike 2 for me was Revenge of the Fallen. Terminator Salvation suddenly looked a lot better after being totally flabbergasted by how utterly non-entertaining Transformers 2 was.

Where do I start? First, the film is miserably long. Over 2 and half hours for a film with essentially a three sentence plot. Now, having a little faith in Michael Bay as an entertainer, I would think that that extra hour or so of run time would be filled with fun, exciting fighting and exploding robots. No. It’s filled with (drumroll please!): dialogue. Bad Dialogue. Dialogue that you would barely tolerate in a one hour and 15 minute B-flick. The most eloquent and coherent lines come from Optimus Prime who dies in the first 45 minutes (not really a spoiler, he’s an effing robot so you can guess the rest). Now for those of you pissed I gave away a major plot point give it up, there’s still 2 hours to go and multiple robot ressurrections, but suffice to say that Optimus Prime is out for well over half the flick.

slim At one point, Transformers 2 got so mind-numbingly dull that my son had to nudge me to keep from dozing off. Imagine my horror when saw that there was well over an hour left after at that point.
The consummate entertainer Bay thought that he could spice up the film by adding a ton of comic relief in the form of making all the Autobots and Decepticons talk in grammatically poor, hip-hop slang. urkel Where the heck did that come from? Was that a theme of the cartoon? All hip-hop jive circa 1986? In an effort to continue to express my confusion in a variety of ways, let me say that I was totally flummoxed.
So in one corner, we have Optimus Prime, who’s not in half the film and Megatron both speaking in eloquent Shakespearean Soliloquy while virtually all the rest spoke in some twisted cross between Slim Shady and Urkel. I dearly wish that I could say this was an exaggeration.

t2-3 Also in the midst of this mess was a personal favorite of mine, John Turturro reprising his role from the first film. He’s actually a high point of the film even though the cash he was paid to do it was dropping out of his pockets in most of his scenes (in this case, this is an exaggeration).

In the midst of the hip hop robots and banal college roommates we have some remarkably klunky and crazed screenwriting. We go from dramatic revelations about the Decepticons’ evil plan to destroy the Earth to screwball scenes where Shia’s mom inadvertently makes an ass of herself after ingesting pot-laced brownies. Utterly unfunny and completely inexplicable.

In addition, after Shia’s house gets destroyed by an unfortunate accident early in the first act, he and his parents look at the smoking remains of their house and simply just go on about their business. Literally, they just go “oh well, insurance and the government will pay for it” and literally just go on about what they were doing 10 minutes prior as if nothing happened, Shia’s character, too. The added urgency that a half dozen mini-decepticons just attacked Shia in his house which lead to the house exploding is completely of no concern to anyone except the homeowner’s muted excitement that they can bilk a new swimming pool out of the insurance settlement. Of course it’s completely of no concern to any of them that their son had just been viciously attacked by a bunch of robots trying to kill him. I’ve really never seen anything like it. The screenplay is stunningly inept and immature.

t2-2 On top of everything, the action is rather dull, with maybe two sequences that even somewhat registered on the “coolness” scale. Quite frankly, by the end, the massive scale killer robot fest in the desert that was reminiscent of the Godzilla brawl in Destroy all Monsters was classic Michael Bay in all the bad ways. Just bunches of robot parts flying at MTV speed to the point that you can’t tell what the hell is going on all capped literally by a big group hug scene by all the human good guys.

I can’t go on, really. It’s THAT bad. Bad pacing, bad dialogue, mediocre action, kiddie level comic relief and a plot that could be written on the back of postage stamp stretched to an agonizing 2 hours and 30 minutes. Apart from a few hardcore long time Transformers fanboys I would recommend everyone else on the planet to stay as far the heck away from this as possible. DAMN YOU MICHAEL BAY! I defended you all this time only for you to shove a railroad spike in my back this summer. Ugh.

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