|
Michael Bay. Those two words should be painted on the fucking poster in giant red stenciled letters like a contamination warning. Fair enough, the guy knows how to blow shit up with the most schizophrenic camera work of any other director on earth. Seriously, with the quick jumps between action scenes I know that epileptics are having seizures somewhere. However, to Michael Bay, the scenes between the explosions and the action are like math problems to a monkey: if you can actually get the monkey to comprehend the concept of math (or in this case, ‘character development’), it will look at the problem with no feasible way to develop a solution. And that is what Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is. Bay does what he does best: Blow shit up, and doesn’t care about what else actually makes a movie, and assumes that audiences are just as ADHD as he is and won’t care.
With Transformers 2 banking $400 Million box office (domestic), apparently Bay’s assumption is right.
I love movies with tons of special effects and explosions, and Transformers 2 has tons of enjoyable scenes and mind-blowing CGI. However, Transformers 2 is completely DEVOID of anything resembling a good movie. B-movies are fun to watch because of absurd plots, characters and interactions; however, when story elements take a back seat to special effects, I feel cheated. In my honest opinion, the characters in Transformers 2 serve only to move one special effects action scene to another, and apparently they don’t need to make sense.
The plot of the movie changes at the drop of a hat in order to lead to the next action sequence, all thanks to characters teleporting all over the fucking globe.
Bay: “Let’s have robots fighting all over the world, like at the Pyramids!”
Writer: “So do we write scenes between Sam and Mikaela on boats or airplanes in order to further develop their characters, their relationship, and the story as a whole?”
Bay: “Fuck story development. They can just teleport. BEEWP! And they’re there!”
Hell, even in normal shots, characters will appear and disappear from the same scene depending on their usefulness. Characters will be standing with one another one minute, and then a split-second later, characters are either conveniently absent or added in order to set up an action sequence, all without any explanation or setup. The entire movie feels like it was written on-the-fly, and edited for time by cutting out “boring ol’ plot development and story” for the sake of keeping the action sequences intact.
When I first saw Transformers 1 in theaters, I was bored as all hell. I sat in the theater for the first hour and a half thinking to myself, “Why the hell did I pay $10 to watch stupid kids climbing trees, dogs with bling, parents that are more annoying and anal than my own, and a teen drama between a skinny geek and a hot girl who can’t act?” The stupidity of the Transformers playing fucking hide-and-seek with Sam’s parents was the moment my childhood shattered and fell to the sticky theater floor. There was nothing that would redeem that steaming piece of shit… Until badass fight towards the end between the Decepticons and the Autobots (as brief and completely out of focus as they were). Others commented that “If the movie had more fighting and less teen drama crap it would be better.”
Careful what you wish for because Transformers 2 is the opposite extreme: All fighting sprinkled with the stupid comedy-relief characters and annoying jokes that I hated from the first movie.
The only thing more pathetic than Bayformers 2 is the rabid fans who are defending this horrible piece of shit. “You are over-analyzing the movie” and “people can’t just enjoy a movie anymore.”
BULLSHIT. I can enjoy a movie like Dark Knight and Iron Man. I can enjoy slasher flicks like Nightmare on Elm Street and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Fucking crap, I can even enjoy B-Movies for the fact that you can at least riff on it ala Mystery Science Theater 3000. I can NOT enjoy Transformers 2.
All of the Bayformers defenders all think that everybody should turn off their brains while they watch Transformers 2, but I’m telling them all to turn their fucking brains ON once in a while. When the hell did “turning off your brains” become the acceptable practice for summer movies? Putting any ounce of thought into this movie you will realize that what you are watching is really fucking stupid. Transformers is not just stupid, it’s TOO stupid for me to enjoy.
More precisely, I could sit and enjoy the stupidity because I didn't have to wonder things like why the Autobots, who were with Optimus Prime like five minutes ago, suddenly disappeared long enough to fight three Decepticons on his own. Or why they suddenly showed up the instant he died? (Answer: Because Michael Bay thought it would be cooler, and fuck you if you think what he's shown you a minute ago is going to get in his way.) Why can only a Prime kill the Fallen? (No fucking clue.) If the Allspark shard can bring a Transformer back to life -- as it does Megatron -- why doesn't Sam use the shard on Optimus instead of Jetfire, whom he hopes will tell him how to find another doohickey that might bring Optimus back to life? (Uh... explosion?) I can't enjoy any of the action scenes because none of the rest of the movie makes any kind of sense.
And then there’s the return of the fucking shitty humor from the cast of comic-relief characters, both human and robots. Why the fuck would an action flick about giant robots blowing shit up in an epic battle for the earth and/or universe be so saturated with robots that piss, fart, act stupid, talk in ‘ebonic’, or hump Megan Fox’s leg. Does Bay actually think that this kind of low-brow, juvenile humor is funny? Was all of this done for a younger audience? If so, then why in the hell was there all the f-bombs, the killing, and a slutty Megan Fox bent over a motorcycle? I’m officially convinced that Bay’s brain was pickled and preserved the moment he hit puberty, never to age from hence forth. That would explain horrible mix of the pre-teen humor, action, violence, language and sexuality in Transformers 2.
Frankly, it all boils down to Devastator's balls. If you think Devastator having two wrecking ball testicles is funny (and I know some people do, because a few people in the theater laughed) then you think the fake scrotums people put on trucks are funny. I'm boggled why Bay would try to cram so much "comedy" into his summer action spectacular.
Oh, the twins? They are hideously fucking racist. I will happily disagree with anyone who says otherwise on this, because besides the voices, besides the gold teeth, besides them yelling they "gon' pop a cap in yo' ass" and besides the illiteracy, they look like robot versions of how cartoonists used to draw African natives back in the early 1900s: Big teeth, big lips, big ears, small heads; like monkeys. It's really, really awful. I’m honestly expecting the following three robots in the inevitable Transformers 3:
- A beatup old truck with a confederate flag that is covered in rust and speaks with a southern accent. Kinda like ‘Mater’ from Pixar’s “Cars” except it wears a white hood.
- A low rider voiced by Cheech Marrin that does more sleeping than fighting, has a sombrero, and attacks with a metal piñata.
- A yellow “ricer” that mixes up the ‘L’s and ‘R’s in its speech, is good at math, and its optical sensors are narrow and slanted.
- A neon pink scooter that slurs his speech and connects to other robots in ways that are deeply pornographic.
But they might not actually be a bad idea. Adding some color to the Transformer designs would help me figure out who the fuck is winning and losing during the action scenes. But it’s not like it matters anyways; the plot was so infinitesimal that the only fights that ever matter were between Optimus Prime, Megatron, and The Fallen. Every other fight was either a mesh of metal parts crashing into eachother like mid-air traffic accidents, or it was Optimus and the other Transformers jumping into the air, twisting and contorting like 12-year-old circus ballerina ninjas, lithe and light as a feather, instead of being enormous hunks of metal. Again, it's Bay refusing to let any sense of reality intrude on what he thinks is cool.
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen did not amuse me, nor did it entertain me because apparently I made the mistake of “leaving my brain on” against the wishes of the Bayformers fans. The action sequences were grand and flashy, but it was the way they were set up that kept me from enjoying them. Instead I spent the entire fight sequence wondering where in the hell Character A appeared from, or where Character B disappeared to. But again, apparently I’m thinking more about plot and story structure than Bay or the Bayformers fanboys want me to. No, I was supposed to laugh at every fart and fuck joke that flashed on the screen; I was supposed to “ooh” and “aah” at the poorly filmed cluster-fuck fight scenes that looked like closeup footage of a toolchest rolling down a cliff; and I was supposed to cry when Sam dies and goes to Robot Heaven (I won’t even get into that, it makes just as little sense as the rest of the movie).
But a lot of you guys loved that movie. I have no clue how. Maybe you guys can turn off your brains, but I don’t want to because I’m too scared I’ll never be able to turn it back on again.
_________________
PSN= "DO-RITOS"
playing Killzone 2, ResidentEvil 5 Versus, Motorstorm Pac Rift, Fat Princess, WipeOut Fury
|
SitemapIndex
RSS Feed