Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Director: Michael Bay
Writers: Screenplay by Ehren Kruger & Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, based on Hasbro’s Transformers
Producers: Ian Bryce, Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura
Stars: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, Ramon Rodriguez, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, Isabel Lucas, John Benjamin Hickey, and featuring the vocal talents of Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving, Tony Todd, Mark Ryan, Charles Adler, Frank Welker


“Well, it's just, you know, listen, it's like...I didn't want to make the boxy characters, you know? Think about it, 30 feet in the air in the real world, just boxes, you know and it'd just look more fake, you know? And by adding more doo-dads, you know, stuff on the...stuff. Stuff on the robots, more car parts, and...you know you can just make it look more real.
-Michael Bay

At some point in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I just gave up. I was no longer sure of what I was watching. I think I saw the US Navy co-ordinate an amphibious landing of tanks from far out in the ocean on about five minutes’ notice. I think I saw someone kill a God in a fistfight. I think I saw robots being born from pods of goo. In the time I have spent contemplating how sentient mechanical beings could come to be and reproduce, I had never considered there was a role to be played by pods of goo. Then again, I also did not think it would require them to have testicles; but I had not factored director Michael Bay’s inability to resist a cheap sight gag into my theorem.

It is not just that this movie does not make sense, it is that it violently unmakes sense. With relentless volume and velocity it smashes it, grinds it into powder and then buries it in the desert to be forgotten by future generations. I had cause enough to enjoy the first live-action Transformers adventure; which was a challenge to sense but also un-self-serious and daftly spectacular. That is a solid achievement for a movie about giant robots from outer space which fight one another when not changing into cars and jets.

But director Michael Bay seems incapable of maintaining un-self-seriousness. He is always hoping to have it both ways; to be treated as a legitimate cinematic artist (watch him shamelessly invoke the tragedy of 9-11 for cheap heft) while maintaining a brand name for himself which adopts words like “overkill”, “juvenile”, and “ridiculous” as badges of honor instead of criticisms. Every art form needs its gonzos that challenge convention and good taste; but Bay is no satirist or conscious provocateur, and he would never sully himself by working in the true margins. He makes summer tentpole movies that cost enough to bring clean water to Africa, and purport to represent the loudest trumpet in the American pop culture band. Deep down he wants everyone on the planet to love these movies, especially the film critics on which he spits.

This movie is 2½ hours long; which is a half-hour longer than it took the not-known-for-brevity Sir David Lean to adapt the plots of Dickens. In that time we will travel from China to California to the East Coast to Outer Space to Egypt. And wherever we go, these loud, large, spiky robots made up of about three million moving parts each will be whirling and leaping and blasting at and pounding on one another at a speed no human eyeball could legitimately claim to comprehend. At what point does a blockbuster movie actually cross the event horizon of logic and clarity and become Koyaanisqatsi?

And why is it so long? As near as I can tell, the plot can be summed up in a sentence – noble and wicked robots, led respectively by Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) and Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving) simultaneously pursue super-powered Whatsit; whose location is only known to human Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). What’s worse is, that was exactly the same plot as the first movie. You would think the story would take less time to re-tell; you would also think Sam Witwicky finds it a cruel coincidence that his brain keeps accidentally serving as a flash drive for Transformers lore.

But it is such a challenge to involve human beings in these stories at all; they are so puny and inconsequential compared with robots that tear apart buildings like cardboard boxes. In this movie a super-secret squadron of human soliders (led by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson of the previous movie) travels the globe with the heroic Autobots, secretly hunting renegade Decepticons; but their strategy of deploying on foot with automatic rifles to face 50-foot-tall robots is lunk-headed on its face, no matter how awesome it makes their biceps look. They take part in the climactic battle to the extent that they run around yelling a great deal, sometimes in slow-motion. It’s to their great good fortune more of them aren’t accidentally squashed; even when back at the base.

Young Sam wants only to get a clean start in college, and charm his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) enough from long-distance that she doesn’t leave him for that motorbike she straddles pornographically. I can see why he wants to go to this college – the dorm rooms are the size of hotel suites, and all the women have the lithe physiques of forest nymphs and act like they’ve inhaled “The Gilroy” from Ocean’s Thirteen.

But, curse it, a leftover fragment of “The Cube” from the previous movie has infected his mind with a riddle leading to the location of “The Matrix”, which the dastardly Decepticons are pursuing in order to; well, do the details matter? They first send a robot disguised as a human to probe his brain; although her probing takes the indirect route. Not least of the many questions raised by a human-looking Transformer is why the Decepticons would even bother with the subtle approach when, again, they have that building-smashing trick pretty well down.

Robots and humans both familiar and new get dragged into the whirligig action. One robot humps Megan Fox’s leg. A much larger robot that seems to be humping orbital communications satellites for information is at least keeping it within the species. John Turturro’s sarcastic government spook returns, and a new friend from Sam’s college (Ramon Rodriguez), is brought along for no reason whatsoever. You’ll notice I have not focused much on the acting – neither does Michael Bay.

But that’s the problem; his biggest, most screen-dominating characters, by their very nature, can’t act. The design of the cinematic Transformers is so convoluted that their details vanish in a blur of visual noise. Even if you can tell one from the other, they cannot convey the simplest emotions without the heavy lifting done by the invisible voice actors. Master animator Hayao Miyazaki drew a scarecrow that had no voice and could only hop along on its pole in Howl’s Moving Castle, and just by the way he posed it in the frame you could tell its mood. These giant robots in Revenge of the Fallen don’t just endanger the Earth, they are an assault on the concept of anthropomorphism.