Review: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Oh.
My.
God.

After the tragic results of the first film, I swore I would not pay a single dime toward viewing a sequel. I would go out of my way to avoid Michael Bay films. The horrid filth of the first film could never lower the bar any further than it had. It took a simple premise (giant robots that can transform into vehicles battling one another over a MacGuffin device) and managed to vomit forth a brutal masterpiece of dizzying and nonsensical narrative that never failed to crap all over any storytelling medium. So I took the high road and just decided that I would lay down not one single penny… but then my wife decided to watch the film while I was on the computer in the same room. Add this terrible mistake to her insistence that Star Wars really isn't all that great and her lack of understanding the pure awesomeness that the film brings to this world. This black hole monstrosity of awfulness managed catching my interest enough to wonder what the hell was going on and how the hell they would justify this meaningless stream of filth. I discovered that the bottom of the well hadn’t even been scraped in the original movie. Things were about to get a whole lot worse.

To be fair, one of my biggest complaints about the first film was a lack of on-screen robot bashing. It was all stuff we heard in the background while human actors would give reaction facial expressions. Learning from his mistakes in the first film, Michael Bay manages to incorporate a few more big-robot battles into this farce when he isn’t shoveling bathroom humor down our gullets with a gleeful disregard to human decency. The constant barrage of explosive sound lets up only long enough for the racial stereo-types to glare with the light of a thousand suns and sear their impressions into even the densest of skulls in the frat-boy acumen for which Bay has built a career. Only slightly less grating on the nerves is the presence of the films lead, a punk kid who has made it his personal mission to become the next … something? I don’t even know what he’s supposed to be. I’m not holding my breath. Megan Fox poses and sort of slinks her way between set pieces, reminding everyone who pays attention that the only real female presence in this testosterone laden clusterbang is a vapid doll incapable of delivering even the slightest line of dialogue with a degree of emotion. Her own feminine charms not-withstanding, we do get the surprise delivery of another transformer in human female guise… which simply BEGS to question why they would bother transforming into cars if they could disguise themselves as normal humans. But we’re not going to bother exploring that concept… or the ability to immediately teleport to any other location the planet. Yeah, that’s thrown in there too for no apparent reason. Look, I could tell you about all the things that fail to ever make the slightest degree of sense, but that’s the entire movie. None of it means anything! They go from point A to point A and nothing ever seems to get accomplished.

So let me tell you about something good. This film, for all its terrible dialogue, lack of focus, piss poor direction, obnoxious narrative, and the formless gear, piston, metallic clanging forms that PASS for Robots this film has a bright shining beacon of goodness. This movie has an AWESOME soundtrack. It has the kind of music that makes you think you are watching something FAR better than it is, something that is heroic, daring, a little scary, and epic in scale. When Optimus rises for battle, you almost forgive the script for the deaux ex machina that brings him back into the conflict… you almost forget that you can only barely tell which transformer is which in the formless jumble of gears that clash against one another, so you sort of know when to cheer and when to jeer. The music is so incredibly good. It’s purely the only redeeming quality of this horror show.

The wonderful thing about a bad movie is that is as capable of inspiring the same passion that a good movie is likely to inspire. For as much as I’m sickened and disgusted by this awful travesty in film making, I know that someone else will make a fantastic film down the road that will inspire me to write something of great praise and worthy regard. I love the storytelling medium of film and I’ll continue to see tons of crap in the hope that I will one day find another great film that inspires me to the same thrills and chills of countless other movies. I can still throw Raiders of the Lost Ark into my DVD player and get all giddy to the adventures of Indiana Jones, or cheer the exploits of Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy, or I could cry my eyes out to the Lord of the Rings and realize that there are still GREAT films out there and that people are still making GREAT films to this day. Maybe I’m being too hard on this brutal assault on the medium… the box office certainly seems to indicate that I’m wholly wrong. The last truly great theatrical film I saw had a dismal return, indicating my lack of connection with the general populace on the whole. I am a niche audience.

0.5 out of a possible 5 for this crapfest.