MOVIE REVIEW: 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'

The Oregonian posted this much, much longer "director's cut" of my not-very-nice "Transformers 2" review on their Web site (A shorter version sees print on Friday, June 26)....

Trying to warn a Michael Bay fan ahead of time that "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is noisy, stupid and pointless is going to be difficult. The average Bay fan will invariably retort along the lines of, "What a shocker! You critics always rip on Bay! What I love about Michael Bay movies is their awesomely pumped-up high-octane idiot Americana! He's critic-proof, bro!"

So before I get into exactly how noisy, stupid and pointless (and racist) "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is, I want to point out that I've defended Mr. Bay's high-octane idiot-Americana in these very pages, more than once. In 2005, I wrote this:

... The easiest thing in the world is to dismiss Bay as a smirking frat-boy lobotomizing moviegoers one over-edited, sunset-dappled shot at a time. But may we dare to declare the man's work a "guilty pleasure"? May we note that his peculiar, ADD-Americana aesthetic is consistently applied? That he almost always gets funny performances out of grade-A supporting actors, especially Steve Buscemi? That he sets out to do nothing but create corny, violent, ludicrous, sentimental action fluff (and yes, this includes "Pearl Harbor")? And that, in fact, he's pretty damn good at it, as far as that sort of filmmaking goes?

I'll even shred any remaining film-snob cred by admitting I'm a fan of Bay's first "Transformers" flick. Yeah, it was a shameless Hasbro tie-in in which characters said things like "Is it fear or courage that compels you, fleshling?" and "I'm never giving you this AllSpark!" and "NoNoNoNoNoNo!" But it was also a summer blockbuster that emotionally connected almost in spite of its gleeful stupidity. This was in part because the special effects were the best we'd ever seen at the time, but also because the movie had a linear storyline that escalated nicely -- boy gets car, car turns out to be giant robot, giant robot drags boy on quest full of insanely well-staged giant-robot battles. The movie wouldn't be out of place among the better '80s B-pictures that went after the Spielberg/Lucas dollar (e.g. "The Last Starfighter"). And for anyone who grew up wanting to see photorealistic footage of giant robots fighting each other and the latest in lovingly photographed military hardware, it was practically fetish porn. (I even thought the twist that America had reverse-engineered automotive technology from a frozen Decepticon was kind of clever.)

Anyway. I'm establishing my Bay/"Transformers"-liking cred here because I want Bay/"Transformers" fans to take my full meaning:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a disaster. A shrill disaster.

The story was apparently outlined in extreme haste so Mr. Bay could start prepping the movie before the 2008 WGA writer's strike; the actual screenplay was written almost as quickly several months later, while pre-production was well underway. As a result, that screenplay is pretty much straight-up nonsense -- a barely strung-together collection of visual ideas and set pieces, with some of the most hilariously stupid and generic dialogue ever financed by hundreds of millions of dollars. (In his hilarious pan of the movie, Roger Ebert quotes this gem, spoken by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!") Even worse, Bay tries to compensate for the nonsense by making everything much, much noisier and more hyperactive than anything he's ever made before (and yes, that includes "Bad Boys II").

The end result is relentlessly unfunny and wreck-your-brain exhausting -- like listening to a crazy person yell conspiracy theories in your ear for two-and-a-half hours (which is, unfortunately, the actual running time of "Transformers 2").

The story, such as it is: It's two years after "Transformers 1." The heroic Autobots are running around the planet with a special human black-ops unit, killing evil Decepticons still hiding around the globe. The Decepticons now talk in their death-throes about the return of something called "The Fallen." Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is heading off to college and leaving his hot, car-loving girlfriend (Megan Fox) and giant-robot/Camaro bodyguard behind, because good Lord what teenage boy would want either of those in his life.

Suddenly, Sam Witwicky finds a piece of the last movie's MacGuffin, the AllSpark. For no particular reason, this now gives him magic Dreyfuss-in-"Close Encounters" visions of ancient Autobot hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs will lead Sam (and the Decepticons chasing him) to a propeller-shaped key called "The Matrix." The Matrix can disintegrate and re-integrate and power a sun-destroying weapon hidden in an Egyptian pyramid and bring dead Autobots to life and also (I'm pretty sure) puts Sam Witwicky in touch with the ghosts of Autobot ancestors who were on earth tens of thousands of years ago, or something.

Oh, and "The Fallen" ends up being a Decepticon with a face like an African mask who's been hiding out on one of Saturn's moons (I think) trying to birth robot babies in goopy amniotic sacs and who can only be defeated by a "Prime," as in Autobot leader Optimus Prime, who is apparently the last of the "Primes," which pretty much look like every other giant robot and don't seem to have any special powers.

If you put a gun to my head and ask me to remember all of this a week from now, you'd better bring someone along to notarize my will.

The fact that this movie's MacGuffin (The Matrix) does about 15 different things should start to give you an idea of how all-over-the-place this sequel is. The story piles on fights and chases and country-hops and new characters until it feels like "The Mummy Returns" on a coke binge. Aircraft carriers sink! There's a long sequence where our heroes break into the National Air and Space Museum to wake up an ancient Transformer who also happens to be decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird who uses one of his landing gear as a cane! There's a hot-chick Transformer with a really long tongue! There's a little Decepticon with a Jersey accent who humps Megan Fox's leg for no reason! Sam Witwicky's mom eats a pot brownie and starts tackling people! Sam Witwicky's parents go to France for a while just so Michael Bay can blow it up (again!). The disgraced John Turturro character turns up working in a Jewish deli, where he secretly runs a Web site that competes with the one run by Sam Witwicky's hysteria-prone college roommate (Ramon Rodriguez)!

The giant-robot battles are still impressive, but there's just so damn much of it -- and so little geography to orient you -- that you glaze over after a while. I've never seen more explosions and epic battles in a single movie, but I've also never seen more explosions and epic battles glanced at by a camera with so little consequence. Imagine all the spectacle of Peter Jackson's "Return of the King" without any of the dramatic context and shakier camera work, and you're starting to get the idea.

Even that might be less of a problem if Bay's direction of actors on this outing had more than two gears: (1) dead stops for paragraph-long exposition and (2) hysterical, sweaty, unfunny shouting that fills up (quite literally) every single non-expository minute of this two-and-a-half hour movie. Watching "Revenge of the Fallen," I got the overpowering sense that Michael Bay has been reined in over the years and given some semblance of storytelling discipline by his longtime producer Jerry Bruckheimer and "Transformers 1" producer Steven Spielberg, but that on this movie (maybe because of the WGA strike, maybe because of the success of the last movie) Bay was finally let off the leash, as it were -- with results that might be Bay's purest auteurist statement, but which are also frankly kind of ugly.

How ugly? How about "elderly robot fart jokes" ugly? How about "dangling robot testes jokes" ugly? How about "cutting to dogs having sex more than once to add a little extra comedy to an already frenetic scene" ugly? Worst of all: How about "Jar-Jar Binks" ugly? Film writers everywhere have been dropping their jaws over the two new comic-relief Transformers who turn up in the movie. Their names are "Mudflap" and "Skids." They speak fluent trash-talk ebonics (as offensively voiced by the very white Tom Kenny), have big ears and buck teeth (one of them gold), get in pointless and distracting fights at crucial moments, and at one point say they "don't do much readin'." (Be sure to read Devin Faraci's account of trying to grill the filmmakers about Mudflap and Skids, only to have each filmmaker pass the responsibility to someone else.)

To sum up: The movie's a frenetic, offensive mess that leaves you more numb than entertained. Even my 12-year-old nephew -- who certainly dug the movie more than I did, being part of its target audience and all -- said afterward that "the first movie had the story" and that "the part where Sam was talking to robot ghosts was where I kind of got less interested."

In the parking lot afterward, I was chatting with Dan Clark, who covers the toy biz for GeekInTheCity.com, and he told me the following: In the movie, there's a Transformer called "Devastator" who's made up of several different construction vehicles (evidently they're called "Constructicons") that all clump together Voltron-style to form a single giant monster. Dan tells me that you can buy each of Devastator's component parts separately, as individual toys, at great expense -- but then you can't fit those parts together to make the actual larger character from the movie. I smell a metaphor.

"Revenge of the Fallen" almost feels like it's signaling an end-game for blockbuster movies: all sensation, no content, catastrophic expense. My thoughts turned to "Idiocracy," in which the hit comedy of the future is a man getting kicked repeatedly in the nads, and to "THX 1138," in which the only holographic TV stations are a sex channel, a violence channel, and a gibberish channel. Bay's almost taken us there with this movie.
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'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' (The Oregonian, Wednesday, June 24, 2009)

Comments

[Craig Spencer]

Couldn't have said it better! I feel like I lost 30 IQ points after watching this. Stimulating the pea-sized amygdala is all Bay can do.

[John Michael Davis]

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" - Amazingly fast paced and difficult for my eyes to translate the action - how did they fit dialogue in this movie? I don't think there was one element of good movie making missing. There was a m...oment when Optimus Prime fights many foes at once that I actually felt like I was on a Hallucenogenic making this a full potency film. A relevatory deep seeded device of high initiation. One could really meditate deeply on this formula for a true transformation in conciousness and possibly enlightenment. This guys appraisal linked here of the movie is correct but totally wrong this time. This is a funny movie. With fast paces on all levels. I say Revenge of the fallen has maintained consistant to original form yet deepend and trancended the formula of the Original movie while capturing the spirit that I hungered for on saturday mornings for the chance to see a robot with a spark of life and will be enjoyable to watch again. To find a movie that I can watch many times is what I ask of a movie. I could watch transformers 2, 10 more times before I would need to reconcider what I've just said about it.