Why Michael Bay needs his ass kicked.....
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Score 1.25 out of 5
Ever since I heard that Michael Bay was directing a sequel to Transformers, I’ve been seriously doubting that he could do the source material justice. Despite nice effects, the first film had serious flaws that kept me from enjoying it fully, and it seems that in this second movie, Bay not only embraces those flaws, he exaggerates them and shoves new ones down our collective throat while demanding we applaud him for it.
I know that I will piss off the teenage contingent by naming the first flaw of both these films but when I’m going to see a series about living robots, I do not, have not, and will not give a rat’s ass about a teenage boy’s love life and making that the central focus instead of whether or not good or bad aliens (whom this film is supposedly named after) will be victorious is just beyond irritating to me. In this movie Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBouf) is going to college and leaving his super-hot girlfriend Mecaila (Meagan Fox) back home along with his parents who have odd adventures with marijuana-laced brownies while dropping Sam off at what appears to be Models Inc. college where it seems EVERY female student is a playboy playmate in training waiting to get all hot and sweaty at the frat parties. He does this after a fragment of the Transformers life-giving Allspark (which he just now finds in his clothing, two years after the last film) leaves a bunch of alien messages in his brain. Oh, and Sam can’t say he loves his girlfriend, thus adding the complexities to the (near-nonexistent) plot.
Oh wait…. this is Transformers….where giant machines are looking to kick the crap out of each other. Aren’t we supposed to care about the robots? Well, Bay seems to care about the kicking part a good bit as there are a lot of fights and explosions in this movie, for which the film’s other premise is that the U.S. armed forces have assembled a new team called NEST (which no longer stands for Nuclear Emergency Search Team, I’m guessing), consisting of American soldiers and Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced by mainstay Peter Cullen) who are tracking and eliminating hidden Decepticons spreading the word about someone called The Fallen, a mysterious tyrant looking to resurrect his number-one soldier Megatron (Hugo Weaving) from the ocean floor. Along with the conniving Starscream, the ‘Cons have a powwow about finding new energy sources to create soldiers while making certain Optimus is eliminated.
Yeah, a bunch of this gives way to creating big fights on screen, but not much to character development or screen time for anyone except the happy couple and their bad dialogue. There are Transformers who’ve been in this story for two films now but we barely know anything about their personalities except for two new characters who are the most asinine waste of screen time since The Matrix Reloaded. They’re a pair of twins I think I’ll refer to as the Jar Jar Bots (voiced by the same guy who did Spongebob), since they’re about as entertaining and created with about as much forethought for the audience intended.
If you haven’t guessed by now we’re on to another of the movie’s flaws as we have a pair of characters designed to appeal to the target demographic of little kids while yelling out lovely words like “pussy” and “shit” routinely as they sport gold teeth. Yeah, kudos to the “writing” team on this one for giving us a bunch of characters with little or no dialog while going out of their way to create offensive material in two the robots for parents to enjoy subjecting their kids to. That way, when the fighting erupts, we won’t have to care about the pain inflicted on whoever we’re seeing, because I found myself not being into what these people were going through one bit.
Case in point: there was a bit of press made about a female autobot being introduced in this film. We see her for about 15 seconds when she's first shown early on and then all of 5 seconds during the final battle when she's shot. So she gets approximately 20 seconds of screen time in a 2 hour 40 minute film and nobody gives a rat's ass when she's capped.
Oh there were some good moments in the fights and the effects are largely improved over the first film in which all the action was incomprehensible. There are more moments during the Transformers fight where slowdowns enhance the Matrix-style impact as the figures are beautifully rendered for daytime scenes. I also have to say I liked the re-designed concept for the Decepticon known as Soundwave, who orbits Earth as a communications satellite voiced by long-time actor Frank Welker, reprising the role he performed in the original cartoon.
However, outside of these elements, Revenge of the Fallen fails because of one indisputable conclusion that has become evident in both of these films: the writers and the director do not believe in their own characters. This lack of belief, similar to what some of my contemporaries keep trying to shove to down my throat, holds that Transformers are just a toy line and should be disposable the moment they appear and not given characterization. Problem is this makes for nothing compelling on the screen and gives the viewer no reason to engage this fictional world. Characters such as Iron Man and Batman had toy lines, but they also had screenwriters on their films who understood how characterization and conflict actually work and didn’t need to resort to T&A gags to keep their stories going. Better yet, the writers of family films Wall-E and The Iron Giant understood these principles while writing quality stories about robot protagonists, so the Transformers writers have no excuse in this regard.
There’s a reason that people enjoyed the animated Transformers: The Movie from 1986 (and can still quote lines from it to this day). There were new characters being developed who actually were machines instead of humans, while Transformers developed previously were being killed off, thus giving the viewers something to attach to and feel loss from. Also, there was memorable dialog being performed by quality actors like Orson Welles Leonard Nimoy. Conversely in the recent TF films, we only hear dialog from a few of the robots while all the focus is on the humans and their problems.
Until the franchise is handed to people who actually want to bring life to title characters appearing in more than one hour out of a 2.5 hour movie, each of these Transformers films will continually decrease in quality and be absolute garbage created by racist misogynist jerks who like to dress up their immature intolerance with robots (who have testicles) and explosions so they can display their moronic tendencies while disguising it as ‘kids movie’ with apparently no respect for that audience or their “filmmaking art”. This is the only such movie that made me angrier each time I thought about it, as do the people who keep trying to tell me I shouldn’t demand quality work if I’m going to pay my money to see a good film in the theater.
In short, f**k Michael Bay, f**k the writing staff, f**k everybody for trying to tell me how incorrectly I’m reacting for desiring a good movie and f**k me for having paid for this f**king garbage. I’d rather pay money to see people beat the f**k out of Michael Bay and pay people to sell tickets to the f**king event.
*sigh* I’m outta here folks. Gotta calm down….
Score 1.25 out of 5
Ever since I heard that Michael Bay was directing a sequel to Transformers, I’ve been seriously doubting that he could do the source material justice. Despite nice effects, the first film had serious flaws that kept me from enjoying it fully, and it seems that in this second movie, Bay not only embraces those flaws, he exaggerates them and shoves new ones down our collective throat while demanding we applaud him for it.
I know that I will piss off the teenage contingent by naming the first flaw of both these films but when I’m going to see a series about living robots, I do not, have not, and will not give a rat’s ass about a teenage boy’s love life and making that the central focus instead of whether or not good or bad aliens (whom this film is supposedly named after) will be victorious is just beyond irritating to me. In this movie Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBouf) is going to college and leaving his super-hot girlfriend Mecaila (Meagan Fox) back home along with his parents who have odd adventures with marijuana-laced brownies while dropping Sam off at what appears to be Models Inc. college where it seems EVERY female student is a playboy playmate in training waiting to get all hot and sweaty at the frat parties. He does this after a fragment of the Transformers life-giving Allspark (which he just now finds in his clothing, two years after the last film) leaves a bunch of alien messages in his brain. Oh, and Sam can’t say he loves his girlfriend, thus adding the complexities to the (near-nonexistent) plot.
Oh wait…. this is Transformers….where giant machines are looking to kick the crap out of each other. Aren’t we supposed to care about the robots? Well, Bay seems to care about the kicking part a good bit as there are a lot of fights and explosions in this movie, for which the film’s other premise is that the U.S. armed forces have assembled a new team called NEST (which no longer stands for Nuclear Emergency Search Team, I’m guessing), consisting of American soldiers and Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced by mainstay Peter Cullen) who are tracking and eliminating hidden Decepticons spreading the word about someone called The Fallen, a mysterious tyrant looking to resurrect his number-one soldier Megatron (Hugo Weaving) from the ocean floor. Along with the conniving Starscream, the ‘Cons have a powwow about finding new energy sources to create soldiers while making certain Optimus is eliminated.
Yeah, a bunch of this gives way to creating big fights on screen, but not much to character development or screen time for anyone except the happy couple and their bad dialogue. There are Transformers who’ve been in this story for two films now but we barely know anything about their personalities except for two new characters who are the most asinine waste of screen time since The Matrix Reloaded. They’re a pair of twins I think I’ll refer to as the Jar Jar Bots (voiced by the same guy who did Spongebob), since they’re about as entertaining and created with about as much forethought for the audience intended.
If you haven’t guessed by now we’re on to another of the movie’s flaws as we have a pair of characters designed to appeal to the target demographic of little kids while yelling out lovely words like “pussy” and “shit” routinely as they sport gold teeth. Yeah, kudos to the “writing” team on this one for giving us a bunch of characters with little or no dialog while going out of their way to create offensive material in two the robots for parents to enjoy subjecting their kids to. That way, when the fighting erupts, we won’t have to care about the pain inflicted on whoever we’re seeing, because I found myself not being into what these people were going through one bit.
Case in point: there was a bit of press made about a female autobot being introduced in this film. We see her for about 15 seconds when she's first shown early on and then all of 5 seconds during the final battle when she's shot. So she gets approximately 20 seconds of screen time in a 2 hour 40 minute film and nobody gives a rat's ass when she's capped.
Oh there were some good moments in the fights and the effects are largely improved over the first film in which all the action was incomprehensible. There are more moments during the Transformers fight where slowdowns enhance the Matrix-style impact as the figures are beautifully rendered for daytime scenes. I also have to say I liked the re-designed concept for the Decepticon known as Soundwave, who orbits Earth as a communications satellite voiced by long-time actor Frank Welker, reprising the role he performed in the original cartoon.
However, outside of these elements, Revenge of the Fallen fails because of one indisputable conclusion that has become evident in both of these films: the writers and the director do not believe in their own characters. This lack of belief, similar to what some of my contemporaries keep trying to shove to down my throat, holds that Transformers are just a toy line and should be disposable the moment they appear and not given characterization. Problem is this makes for nothing compelling on the screen and gives the viewer no reason to engage this fictional world. Characters such as Iron Man and Batman had toy lines, but they also had screenwriters on their films who understood how characterization and conflict actually work and didn’t need to resort to T&A gags to keep their stories going. Better yet, the writers of family films Wall-E and The Iron Giant understood these principles while writing quality stories about robot protagonists, so the Transformers writers have no excuse in this regard.
There’s a reason that people enjoyed the animated Transformers: The Movie from 1986 (and can still quote lines from it to this day). There were new characters being developed who actually were machines instead of humans, while Transformers developed previously were being killed off, thus giving the viewers something to attach to and feel loss from. Also, there was memorable dialog being performed by quality actors like Orson Welles Leonard Nimoy. Conversely in the recent TF films, we only hear dialog from a few of the robots while all the focus is on the humans and their problems.
Until the franchise is handed to people who actually want to bring life to title characters appearing in more than one hour out of a 2.5 hour movie, each of these Transformers films will continually decrease in quality and be absolute garbage created by racist misogynist jerks who like to dress up their immature intolerance with robots (who have testicles) and explosions so they can display their moronic tendencies while disguising it as ‘kids movie’ with apparently no respect for that audience or their “filmmaking art”. This is the only such movie that made me angrier each time I thought about it, as do the people who keep trying to tell me I shouldn’t demand quality work if I’m going to pay my money to see a good film in the theater.
In short, f**k Michael Bay, f**k the writing staff, f**k everybody for trying to tell me how incorrectly I’m reacting for desiring a good movie and f**k me for having paid for this f**king garbage. I’d rather pay money to see people beat the f**k out of Michael Bay and pay people to sell tickets to the f**king event.
*sigh* I’m outta here folks. Gotta calm down….