Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
You might think that Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is a mere popcorn flick, but actually, it is the best film of 2009 and could very well be the best film of the decade. That statement is something you won’t read anywhere else and, unfortunately, it is a completely fabricated falsity. I wish it were true – if only based on the sheer number of people (that will be wasting their hard-earned money – and time!) going to see Transformers 2 – but, alas, it is not. Before the movie was released, Spielberg supposedly commended Bay on making an “awesome” film that was better than the original, but that cannot possibly have really happened. Now, if he had said something about the movie being so “awesomely bad” that, in retrospect, the original seems better, that could easily be believed.
In the first ten minutes we get a glimpse of the twin robots that masquerade as comic relief for most of the film, some brief Oriental music when the robots crash through an Asian man’s house (while he’s eating with chopsticks) and a few choice lines, like: “Damn, I’m good” (after one robot cuts a car completely in half), “Pull over” (to the giant wheeled robot crushing cars) and “Punk-ass Decepticon” (delivered – with a British accent, no less – to a fallen enemy). Then the focus jumps to an uninspired segment about leaving for college with Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), his parents, his girlfriend (Megan Fox) and his pet robot car, Bumblebee, who breaks down into tears (transmission fluid?). When they finally get to the campus the mother says, “It’s just like Hogwarts,” which, aside from being the only funny line in the film, comes before she doses herself with marijuana and turns into a complete loony. (Because…you know, “taking the pot” makes people lose control and go crazy. Right?)
This movie also suffers from the same affliction as almost every film with an animated character and some of the blame must fall on the animators themselves. It’s like the only place that teaches animation is the George Lucas School of Stereotypical Animated Characters or something. And the best thing that can be said about most of the robots in this movie is that they are stereotypical. The twin robots from the beginning turn out to be monkey-headed jive-talkers that cannot read. One of them even has a gold tooth. He only has two teeth, but one of them is gold. (Does it not count as racism if the characters aren’t actually human?) Later, there is a remote-controlled car robot that sounds like some sort of mob underling
and an evil doctor robot with a Nazi – excuse me, German – accent. The clichéd characters wouldn’t be quite as bad if they inhabited a story of some sort, but they must have used the plot budget on stereotype research. The guys that are rumored to have written the story, Orci and Kurtzman, have once again inserted a giant chunk of exposition into the middle of their film, which is now the defining characteristic of their scripts. (See this year’s Star Trek for another example of their lazy storytelling that everyone seems to have ignored.) The exposition phase starts around the halfway point and is only briefly interrupted in order to wake up a SR-71 Blackbird with a British accent (does that seem somehow “not right” to anyone else?) so that the new character can continue the exposition.
- Score
- 2/10
Sure, Transformers is a movie series based on a cartoon series that was based on a line of toys, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically expect it to be of lesser quality and lower the bar when judging it. They spent over two hundred million dollars – the yearly income of roughly four thousand average American families – to make this debacle and it would be more offensive by orders of magnitude to learn that the filmmakers deliberately created a deficient product to pawn off on millions of average families across the world. Michael Bay doesn’t respect his audience (a Bad Boys II poster is shamelessly displayed on the wall in the dorm room) or his subject matter (robots with an inability to control their bodily functions, leg humping robots and robot genitalia? Seriously?) and there are clues to imply that he knows exactly what he’s doing (at one point in the film Bay has robots destroying books in a library, which – in addition to being an appropriate metaphor for the film itself – feels like a knowing wink at the expense of the audience) and it’s deplorable that you people are essentially voting (with your dollars) for more of the same by supporting films like this.
