| | I think I may have crossed another threshold on the journey towards “getting old.” I went to see Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the other day, and I’m starting to realize what my parents must have felt like while watching the original “Generation 1” Transformers cartoon with me, particularly the animated movie from 1986.
Revenge of the Fallen is, of course, the sequel to 2007’s Transformers, and though that film certainly was no masterpiece, it at least had moments (fleeting though they were) of genuine wit, imagination, and even a slight bit of awe. The new film, on the other hand, is a colossal mess: a chaotic and almost completely incomprehensible two-and-a-half-hour onslaught of Bayhem.
Now before you start criticizing me for expecting Citizen Kane or something, hear me out. I’m a fan of summer blockbusters; I realize that you often do have to disconnect your higher brain functions in order to enjoy them. So the movie’s plot is ridiculous, its characterizations are paper-thin, and its jaw-droppingly embarrassing attempts at humor aren’t the least bit funny (although I have to point out that many a summer blockbuster has cracked these problems quite successfully). Fair enough; we’re here to see giant robots fight each other, and then transform into vehicles and crash into each other.
The problem is that we don’t really get to see much of that; the camera never stops moving long enough to let us. The first time Optimus Prime transforms, the camera swerves around him a couple of times in order to, in theory, allow us to see every last gear and switch. But between the motion blur and our disorientation at the last such transformation effect, we never get a good look at any of it. Now we’re disoriented again and not able to fully appreciate seeing Prime in all his giant robotic glory before the movie cuts to something else.
While we’re on the subject of cutting, the movie looks like it was edited with a cheese grater, which adds to our bewilderment of what’s going on. Scenes are hacked up to bits in such a way that by the time we finally come close to figuring out what’s going on, we’re already half-way through another scene that’s in the middle of doing the same thing to us. There is no overall build, no sense of anticipation. For all the $200 million that went into this thing, Bay is still making commercials; each scene is shot and edited as if it were a stand-alone ad (whether for GM, the Army, or simply a better movie, I don‘t know). Even though this has pretty much been Bay’s standard operating procedure since he actually was making commercials, here it seems more glaring and obvious than usual.
I’d try to explain the plot, but there’s no point. And as I’ve said, that’s not my problem. It’s one thing for a movie to have a silly plot that you just go along with as part of the fun; it’s quite another to literally not be able to tell what’s physically happening on the screen. Let me put it this way: I know most of these characters’ names. I know that Devastator is a giant Decepticon made up of six (or in this movie’s case, seven) construction vehicles, and yet he was almost completely formed before I knew what was happening. There’s one shot where you faintly see, through a storm of digitally created sand, a cement mixer ramming into another vehicle and attaching itself to it. The rest is just a mass of metal falling on top of itself.
Many of the new characters are similarly improperly introduced, and even the returning ones are hidden once again by the motion blur of Bay’s swooping camera (I was watching the cast list at the end before I realized that Ratchet and Ironhide were even in this movie). And when it came to the much ballyhooed forest battle, even with the expanded aspect ratio of the IMAX screen, I couldn’t tell you whether Optimus was fighting Megatron, Starscream, or Mechagodzilla.
When I got home from the theater, I popped in my DVD of the aforementioned animated Transformers: The Movie from the 80s just to see if I really was unfairly trashing ROTF’s incoherence. Sure enough, the animated film is probably hard to follow for the uninitiated, but even if you don’t know the characters’ names, you can at least recognize the Autobot who sounds like Scatman Crothers every time he’s on screen and usually, you’re able to discern what he’s doing. And also…
SLIGHT SPOILER
…at least that film was able to pull off the death of a beloved character with a modicum of genuine emotion and pathos, while ROTF just kind of lets it happen almost as a “By-the-way, this is happening…” Seriously, how do you screw up a story beat like that?
END SPOILER
I dunno. I’m sure that ROTF will make a ton of money (it already has brought in quite a haul). I’m sure studio execs are thinking, “Alright, now we need more movies about giant robots crashing into each other and little dog robots humping girls’ legs and real dogs going at it on top of a mailbox and mothers getting high off pot brownies and twin robots acting like Amos ‘n Andy (because that’s really funny) and former government agents working at delis and being all funny and, and, and….” And at that point, the execs’ brains will explode from trying to comprehend the idea of all those things existing in one movie and the potential money to be made from bringing in audience members who might like one or more of them.
Meanwhile, the audience won’t know what to think, but they’ll have already paid their money, and the new execs who take over will slip on the remains of the old execs’ brains that are still on the conference room floor, see what they were thinking about, and put two and two together. Then they’ll say, “Alright, now we need more movies about giant robots crashing into each other,” etc., and the cycle will repeat itself.
And more garbage like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will get made, and we’ll probably go to see it.
|
| | Posted 7/1/2009 3:37 AM - 4 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
