Movie Review: Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen

For those who missed it, I put up a post (backdated and sticky) depicting the codes in use for the smileys on this blog. Check it out. Have fun making faces at me!

It’s been hotter than blue blazes here (as we say in Texas), but we’ve been gearing up for a yard sale all month, and it’s finally going to happen. Due to the fact that mornings are evil and we can never be relied upon to be awake at such horrid times of day, we’ve elected to step outside the box and hold our “patio sale” in the evening hours, when it’s cooler and people are coming home from work. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings from 6 pm to 9 pm, we’ll be selling our used stuff to other people for survival money, cuz I’m so broke I’m starting to bleed. Furthermore, we’ll be doing this on a weekly basis until everything is gone, because we have too much stuff to put out there at once and we’ll be adding more over time as we make room. Come on down!

Review: Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen

We went to see the new Transformers movie, and I was very disappointed. SPOILER ALERT! It was a very disjointed movie. I’m going to give a detailed description to illustrate my issues with it, but some of the events may be out of order because a single viewing is not enough to cement everything in my mind (and this is with all movies). I’ll also mention that we loved the first Transformers movie.

I’m using an Entertainment Weekly review to aid my memory. It starts out with a Stone Age visit by some “transformers,” when they hide some secret magical item and a few of them entomb it with their bodies to protect it. Fast forward to the present when our friendly Autobots are zipping around Shanghai chasing some Decepticon infiltrators, for whatever reason. The first issue I have is that known Autobot characters are all but omitted; we see only Optimus Prime and Bumblebee for any real screen time. Replacing them in our starring roles are a bunch of random motorcycle Autobots and a pair of “twins” that evidently exist for comic relief, but only irritate. These new good guys are just tossed in willy nilly during the Shanghai chase with no clear indication of who are good guys and who are bad guys. I spent this scene trying to figure out who these characters were. The motorcycle “girls” are introduced with holographic riders; you may remember that in the first movie, only the Decepticons used holographic drivers, so I inferred these girls to be Decepticons. Turns out they’re not.

Back in a more sensible world, Sam Witwicky is getting ready to start college. His parents are packing him up and his mother is having a snifflefest because her baby is going away. Typical crap. Sam calls Michaela on the phone, his girlfriend from movie one. We shift to see Michaela answer her phone. Our first view of her is a gratuitous butt shot – she’s lying on a motorcycle on her stomach with one foot on the ground, wearing short-shorts, and clearly a thong or else she’s going commando, cuz we get a good long look at her ass.

Sam has discovered a shard of the Cube from the first movie, snagged in the jacket he was wearing but which he hasn’t worn in the year (or is it two? I think it’s two) since. It falls to the floor, dissolving the floor as if it’s got acid for blood (ooh, crossover movie in the works? Alien Versus Autobots!), falling downstairs to the kitchen where it transforms all the kitchen appliances into little evil robots that run around like gremlins (another crossover! woot!) while he tries to kill them all. Eventually that gets taken care of like no big deal, but we get the point that this shard, which Sam now has in his possession, is trouble.

Sam is bebopping around the house when Michaela shows up on her motorcycle. Megan Fox, who plays Michaela, has had collagen injections to her lips and it’s immediately apparent, to the point that I spent the entire movie staring at them and wanting to slap her for vanity. She’s absolutely beautiful and doesn’t need collagen to “improve” her looks. Ick. Okay, so she shows up and she’s now in this leather catsuit riding getup. She and Sam argue about who’s going to say “I love you” first. While he’s momentarily busy, she strips down and is wearing this tiny little white, uh, dress? nightie? who knows, underneath. She produces a bouquet of flowers from nowhere, and is standing there looking radiant. I’m thinking, “Wait, is there going to be a wedding? What’s going on?” Sam spies her, and they argue playfully some more. The white getup was evidently just an excuse for Michaela to strip down on camera. She’s being squeezed for every drop of cheesecake in her, uh, body.

Bumblebee, as resident First Car and Guardian, is excited about accompanying Sam to college until Sam tells him he can’t go. Freshmen can’t have cars on campus. Bumblebee throws a hilarious little temper tantrum, which was the first bright moment in the movie for me. However, he’s lost his voice again, and can only talk with the radio. Why? No idea. I personally think they wanted to reproduce every element that worked in the first movie, and damn the logical torpedoes. Sam tries to console Bumblebee and off they go to take him to school, while Michaela is now back in her catsuit and taking her leave. They’ve made a date to meet online for a video chat or something, later that night.

Sam arrives at school and discovers his new roommates are geeks of the Lone Gunmen order, sequestered in a dark room already with only their computer screens illuminating their surroundings. We learn that one of the roommates, whose name I didn’t catch, is obsessed with these robots from outer space that tore through downtown L.A. a couple of years back. (This would be the battle from the first movie.) I can’t remember what city Sam’s college is in. Sam, of course, knows all about the robots from outer space, but is trying to remove himself from the clutches of his roommates even as they’ve extended their inescapable tractor beam his direction.

As Sam is trying to settle in, his mother naively purchases some marijuana brownies and is munching happily away, resisting attempts from Sam and her husband to get the brownies away from her. She gets super stoned in about 30 seconds, which is ridiculous, but what’s worse is that she acts more drunk than high, and she stumbles around looking like an idiot and flirting with the young college boys. It was clearly an effort to take her comedic moments from movie one and draw them out further, but it was completely unnecessary and, honestly, squirm worthy. Meanwhile, Sam randomly starts twitching at various moments, getting this weird look on his face. He’s seeing visions of alien words or numbers, evidently zapped into him by his touching the shard of the Cube. Right.

The parents finally depart. Roommate (this will be his name henceforth) drags Sam off to some party, where he shows Sam the object of his lust, a very attractive, sultry girl who smells like trouble a mile away. Sam is trying to get back to the dorm so he can meet Michaela for their online date, but he’s waylaid by this girl who has zeroed in on him as her primary target. There is chaos and Sam misses his date. Michaela is unhappy but unsurprised. She, back at her trusty mechanic’s garage, ends up with a little Decepticon pet. I can’t remember if it was the shard that created it (as Michaela now has the shard in safekeeping), or if it showed up some other way. In any case, she’s got it stashed in her luggage and is now heading out to find Sam at college. (Earlier, Sam told Optimus Prime that he didn’t want to be part of the big robot battle anymore and he just wanted to live his life.)

Fast forward, Sam has covered the walls of the dorm with the weird alien language that won’t get out of his head. Roommate is boggled, then College Girl shows up and basically throws Sam on the bed where she eventually reveals herself to be a Decepticon (as if we didn’t know). Her perfect disguise is discovered by Roommate and Michaela, who discover them making out on the bed. Sam is trying to escape but of course that’s not how it looks. They all run, and Decepticon College Girl chases them out of the building, destroying everything in sight as she transforms in a way distinctly reminiscent of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This movie just rips off everything.

Somehow, and it’s all a blur, we end up in some museum that reminded me of the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. We’ve got Sam, Michaela, Roommate (who’s learning much more about alien robots than he ever wanted to), and Little Decepticon Pet (LDP). We’re there to revive some plane so that he can help Sam figure out what this language is trying to tell him before he goes bonkers or zones out at the wrong moment. The shard of the cube revives the plane, which, OMG! has the Decepticon mark… but wait, it’s a good Decepticon who long ago defected to the other side. He’s a wizened old fart who uses a cane (!) and plays the history teacher in the movie, revealing to Sam and crew about this old artifact that was buried in the opening scenes of the movie. This artifact can bleed all the energy from the sun, and store it so that the Decepticons can take over the universe, or some shit. In any case, the sun will blink out and humans will die a very cold death.

The Decepticon who’s all hot and bothered to find this artifact thingy is called The Fallen. Here I’d thought that “the fallen” referred to the dead & buried Decepticons at the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss. Of course not. And yet, some other Decepticons take the plunge, go to the bottom of the Abyss and retrieve (only) Megatron and revive him, because what’s a Transformers movie without Megatron, right? But the other Decepticons from movie one are left to rot, so to speak. Megatron, since he had the Cube shoved into his chest in the first movie, is salvageable, so they wake him up and set him on “kill.”

A bunch of Decepticons, at some point, kidnap Sam’s parents to use as hostages for later in the movie. Roommate drags Sam to some butcher shop to meet his nemesis in the online world, who evidently knows everything about the alien robots. It turns out to be Agent Simmons (John Turturro), the annoying Sector Seven agent from movie one. He joins their motley crew in their quest to get to this artifact thingy before The Fallen does.

We end up in the Middle East, again, because that’s another bit that worked so nicely in movie one. We have a bunch of battles. The race to find the artifact is crucial for the good guys because Optimus Prime is killed earlier on, and the artifact is the only thing that can save him. (Hell, don’t ask me how to make sense of any of this Cube/artifact/revive-this-robot-this-way-and-that-robot-that-way crap. I’m sure it’s elementary and I’m just too dense to see it. ) So, a bunch of battling in the Middle East; we find Sam’s parents; we learn that Roommate is a whiny coward; we see fleeting glimpses of Ratchet and other characters but nothing more; we meet the military dudes from movie one again; and we see an unfortunate closeup of John Turturro’s hairy ass. Bet you didn’t see that coming!

Oh, I forgot. It’s actually Egypt, and the pyramids make great stepping stones for the Decepticons in place of skyscrapers. At one point, Agent Simmons is lurking on a pyramid, just behind and below a Decepticon perched on the summit. There are two, uh, balls hanging mysteriously from the Decepticon’s crotch, and Agent Simmons reports that he’s “positioned just behind the enemy’s scrotum.”

To sum up, the movie is long, convoluted, nonsensical, and contained “homages” to umpteen other films within it. It also inspired the desire to scrub my brain a time or two. I’ll stop here, mainly because I don’t feel like writing anymore but also because the end of the film is a blur to me.

I don’t recommend it, unfortunately. Grade: C-.

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