What happens when an auteur known for his excess is given all the money in the world and nobody ever thinks to tell him “Michael, I don’t think that’s a good idea?”You get Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Transformers 2 has to be the most expensive film ever made, right? Considering how many things blow up and how 99% of the film is a special effect (including Megan Fox). It’s so expensive that everything is rendered in a gold hue. This is a 24-karat movie.
And don’t act surprised that it happened. All of us gave money to movies when we paid to see the first one, and sequels nowadays do nothing if not escalate matters. If there was a scene in Transformers where Michael Bay shot a minority point blank, the sequel would have had Michael Bay orchestrating the extermination of an entire race.
Remember, we gave him permission because we paid for the first one.
And I don’t even like the Transformers all that much.
FULL DISCLOSURE
Let’s be honest here: Transformers is a stupid movie based on toys. Oh, and there’s a cartoon or
something. I hated the first one, for all I wanted was robots and explosions -- not robots hiding behind trees from easily crushable parents and a Spielbergian treasure hunt. The night I saw it, a friend of mine exclaimed it was the best film he had seen in a long time. I quickly turned around, left the theatre, and drove home alone.Transformers 2 is about 30 to 40 minutes way too long. If you cut out some of the boring human parts in the latter hour of the film, I’d call it the best thing ever. As it is, I might still call it the best thing ever. Not the best movie ever, mind you. The best thing ever.
PAINTING OVER THE POSTER
Michael Bay’s best film is Bad Boys II. It’s where he perfected his cinema of excessive overindulgence, with a car chase that uses cadavers as obstacles hurled at our heroes and a third act that involves Martin Lawrence and Will Smith invading Cuba. I’m not joking. There’s some semblance of a plot (about drug dealers or something), but Bad Boys II is almost exclusively about set pieces, quips, and a complete disregard for all we hold dear. It’s so over-the-top that it’s clearly the work of a mad genius with a disregard for things like the three-act structure or emotion or even humanity.
Transformers 2 is even above that.
I cannot tell you what Transformers 2 is about. I don’t know who the new villain is or why he wants to blow up the sun with a laser hidden in a pyramid. I don’t know why Optimus Prime is the only robot that can defeat Robo-Pharaoh. I don’t know how a chase scene that began in a college moved to a torture scene at a warehouse and suddenly ended with a fight scene in the forest (you see, it’s like nature versus technology!). I don’t know what’s so important about all those weird symbols that Shia LeBeouf sees or why he doesn’t want his robot car to come to college with him. I don’t know why Tyrese or Josh Duhamel or even John Turturro are even in this movie.None of it. Makes. Any. Sense.
When you give Michael Bay so much money to make a two-and-a-half hour film, don’t be surprised that the suburban family house explodes because it’s full of transforming kitchen appliances or that there’s a completely unnecessary scene where the mother accidentally eats pot brownies and goes apeshit. Don’t be surprised when the elderly English Transformer farts and a parachute POOFS out of his ass or when the family dogs are humping then the doghouse explodes. Definitely don’t be surprised when the tiny sidekick Decepticon starts humping Megan Fox’s leg or that there are like SIX sidekicks and five of them are ridiculous stereotypes. This is where Michael Bay’s perverse interests lie and giving him more money means that he just ups the ante on all of it.
There’s a scene where Shia LeBeouf is stricken with A Beautiful Mind and starts scrawling weird alien symbols all over his dorm room. His walls are adorned with posters of movies and half-naked supermodels. Which poster does he begin to paint over?
Bad Boys II.
SOME OF US STILL VIEW THE WORLD THIS WAY
Imagine you were born in -- Jesus Christ -- 1997. Kurt Cobain and Biggie are as irrelevant as
classic rock. You never saw a good episode of The Simpsons. You’ve never known what it was like to grow up as an American feeling relatively safe under Clinton. Nay, while you were relatively conscious when planes flew into the World Trade Center (but you didn’t understand it) and as you rose through the ranks of elementary school, the adults kept talking about terrorism. Being a 12-year-old, you like robots and explosions and Spider-Man. Your cousins are probably getting limbs blown off in the Middle East (whatever that is) and you don’t really know why except that your parents and teachers tell you it’s for your freedom. Meanwhile Jack Bauer is punching Muslims on television. You just got your first hard-on and look on the internet for porn when Mom and Dad are asleep. All you know about other races is what you’ve seen on TV -- rap videos, sitcoms, those boring political dramas your parents watch. You stayed up late without your parents noticing and watched Species on the Sci-Fi Channel. All the while everything is a bomb waiting to kill you. Technology is a mystery. Even cars. What do you know? You can’t even drive yet.Now you see Transformers 2. A film where household appliances turn into missile-shooting killing machines. Where geography makes no sense because you haven’t been anywhere. Where your best friend is your car-which-turns-into-a-robot. Where even the weird Italian stereotype robot wants to fuck Megan Fox. Where a robot made of construction equipment has wrecking balls for testicles. Where there’s a Decepticon with a murderous tongue tentacle who poses as a slutty college girl with no explanation or reason. Where the black stereotype robot has a gold tooth. Where the villain has a helmet like a Pharaoh and the Sun-Destroying-Laser is hidden in a pyramid in the desert. Where the bad guy wants to destroy the Sun for completely unknown reasons except for the fact that he’s evil. Where heaven is full of robots. And it all makes perfect fucking sense to you.
I submit to you, then, that Transformers 2 is a perfect depiction of a 12-year-old’s Freudian fever dream of what the world is, oversimplified with lots of juvenile dick jokes. The line dividing reality and cartoon doesn’t exist and things just happen because the world’s confusing and you don’t really understand cause and effect yet. And surely cars can turn into robots because you saw it on TV and science can do anything.It’s the feeling I got watching James Bond films as a kid, where I didn’t understand why Agent 007 was traveling to five exotic locales in two-and-a-half hours but I knew who the bad guy was because he sat in a chair. Transformers 2 recreates that by completely lacking basic connective tissue. I don’t know what I watched, but I know I was amazed that it happened.
LOGGING INTO ROBOT HEAVEN: THE DEATH OF REALITY AND CINEMA
My nightmares from now on will be about what Transformers 3: Megatron Unleashed: Succumb to The Doom of Your Perceptions will be like. He put Earth in debt in order to make this film. How will he ever be able to top it? Will Transformers 3: God is a Decepticon be the film that bankrupts cinema?Why does this keep happening? Why are summer films getting increasingly expensive and longer? I await the summer blockbuster that changes the way summer films are made. What is the film that will finally doom the form and make Hollywood collectively say “No, this will never happen again.” I’m betting on Transformers 3: Cannon Robo Overdrive.
Wikipedia tells me that Michael Bay keeps having trouble introducing a Transformer that turns into an aircraft carrier. Holy shit. Suggestion for next time: make The Moon a transformer.
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly seemingly made Southland Tales to show his distaste for traditional Hollywood storytelling by making a borderline nonsensical film that only pretends to be some kind of socially conscious Phillip K. Dickian sci-fi piece but might just be either a brilliant piece of anti-cinema or a mess of pretentious wank. Or both.
Michael Bay did nearly the same thing, but with racial stereotypes and completely unintentional.
FURTHER READING
io9 reads {Transformers 2} as “a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot,” and I’m inclined to agree.
Devin Faraci on CHUD gives an objective criticism of the film, though I don’t think the film is interested in being an entertaining summer film. In fact, I don’t think the film is interested in existing in the traditional sense. I think it’s interested in existing in the same way that a tornado is. He also digs Bad Boys II.


































































