Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Holy Christ. I have never hated a film as much as I hate Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'll get to the specifics in a minute, but first I need to just relax, collect myself, and breathe. Calm down before I break something. Soak in the Buddhadharma a bit; appeal to Avilokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, for wisdom and understanding; om mani padme hum...
look upon this and despair
Okay. It's not just that this film is dumb. It's not just that it's inchoate, sub-juvenile, noisy mayhem (it is a Michael Bay film, after all—what did you expect?) It's not even that it's an utter, damnably shameful waste of the talent of John Turturro, or that it's two-and-a-half hours of having your eyes getting kicked in their balls. No, what sets this film apart, what really distinguishes it from the rest of the loud ugly big-budget psychic junk food that Hollywood serves up year in and year out, is that T:RotF serves as a temple to the god of waste. This movie is so wasteful of everything, so shameful and atavistic, that it forments political instability. It raises the possibility of actual revolution.
I'm not kidding. One day, films like this will be looked back on as a major contributing factor to the collapse of the commercial-industrial order that created it. Sure, big-budget Hollywood crap is, practically by definition, wasteful. Perfectly good cars get blown up; gratuitous sets are assembled, then torn down and the materials tossed away; "actors" command obscene salaries; megawatts of electricity are squandered on rendering farms for useless CGI. Few films have such a concentration and volume of those wretched realities as does today's entry, but its distinction lies not just in degree, but in kind. There is a malfeasance at work here that transforms (ahem) this film from clangy-shiny-bread-and-circus mundanity to a sparkling exemplar of fascist art.
Yeah, I went there. I said it and I meant it. I know there has been something akin to a fad lately of declaring blockbusters "fascist", but that doesn't mean the assessments are necessarily off-base. Likewise, I think the charge that critics who claim 'fascism' are psychologizing their targets is overblown. Anecdotally, many of my film-buff colleagues claim that Bay is merely a buffoon: a hack, however overpaid. I claim here and now, however, that such a dismissal is wrongheaded, in much the same way that it was wrong to dismiss George W. Bush as some kind of affable moron. (Indeed, T:RotF could almost serve as a primer on the Bush years.) Bay is clearly in love with power, and that, more than anything, is what comes seeping through every frame. More specifically, it's not a simple fetishizing of the masculine form (ala 300) or the portrayal of violence as a path to redemption (viz. Gladiator); rather it's the power Bay has to produce so much waste. Aside from the real-world waste involved in producing such a film (staggering though it is) the film itself fetishizes and revels in waste and destruction. For instance, there is a scene where the Great Pyramid at Giza is ripped apart by a giant robot with huge, swaying, wrecking-ball testicles (for real). While this is clearly emblematic of what I'm getting at here, there's more subtle variations on the theme, as well.
Here's one. A central premise of the plot is that the Autobots (the good robots) are in a secret alliance with humanity to fight the Decepticons (bad bots!), and a key proviso of said alliance is that humans, for some utterly retarded reason, are to do "the majority of the fighting first", calling in Autobot reinforcements only as necessary. Hence, in the opening setpiece, the battle between puny humans and giant robot goes much as you'd expect: humans get stomped, and badly. Eventually, the Autobots are engaged and they quickly put an end to the shenanigans slaughter of defenseless humans. We then cut to a scene where military leaders are discussing the results of the previous action with Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. The gist of the conversation is that the casualty counts on such raids has been too high. Which means, supposedly, that this scene has played out before. So what we have here is a world in which super-intelligent space robots working with our top military leaders have devised an overall battle strategy little changed from that of the Somme. Here, it's human lives being wasted.
Want more? You know that stock character in most action films, the government bureaucrat meddling in the affairs of the noble military? The one who's imperious when he has the upper hand, but sniveling and useless when the chips are down? Yeah, he's here, laying waste to the notion that force isn't everything. (In Bay's universe, governments are useful only to the extent that they are paternalistic providers of military hardware, diplomacy always fails, intellectuals are craven, and opponents are motivated purely by spite and evil—which of course know no bounds and are therefore insatiable. Hence, the bad guy's plan is to "blow up the sun", a stupidity not seen since Plan 9 From Outer Space. No wait, that's unfair, because in Plan 9 the aliens were trying to prevent the accidental destruction of the sun, not the intentional destruction of the sun. So there you have it. This movie is actually worse than Plan 9. "This world will be forever dark!" rasps the baddy, apparently unaware that Earth would be more than merely dark were the sun blown up.)
Here's another. Nobody—and I mean nobody, not even John Waters—can make beauty creepy like Michael Bay. Most obviously I'm talking here about Megan Fox, but Bay has this notion that females in general are to be dipped in bronzer and baked in a tanning booth until they are both brownish-orange and have a hard shiny candy shell. There's no denying that Fox is an attractive woman, at least in real life. Here, she's a walking crème brûlée. It's Bay saying to his audience, "I know she's pretty. I'm going to paint her like a circus clown anyway." He gives the same treatment to Isabel Lucas, with the added indignity of a panty shot, a robotic tail, and not one, but two scenes in which she tries to seduce Shia LaBeouf. My god, what people will do to forge a career in pictures.
(FYI, "indignity" gets a new definition when you consider what Julie White, as LaBeouf's motormouth mother, goes through. While taking LaBeouf to college she eats some pot brownies and, instead of developing more appreciation for Charles Mingus, she goes beserk. Reefer Madness is vérité in comparison.)
That's how this film goes: it's 2+ hours of a middle finger in your face. Princeton University is an upscale and perpetual Spring Break bash (I went to Chico State and I never saw parties like that. I mean really.) Two dogs hump each other several times in the first half hour, and a robot humps Fox's leg. Somehow, there's nothing funny about either. Rainn Wilson is wasted in a brief role as the lamest stereotype of a arrogant professorial blowhard ever (seriously, Glen Beck's "comedy" is more nuanced). John Turturro isn't just wasted, he's humilated, literally embarrassed, in a scene where he not only drops his pants, but drops his pants to reveal he's wearing a scanty thong. Two new autobots—Wheelie and Skids—provide a shuck-and-jive routine so clownish as to shame Jar-Jar Binks, and, if that wasn't bad enough, they were voiced by Tom Kenny, a profoundly funny guy from the beloved Mr. Show. So now they've tarnished that memory.
But perhaps the most subtle waste is the way in which all the purported "entertainment" fails to entertain. The common apologia—"calm down, it's just dumb stuff for ten-year-olds"—falls down here, as well. There are numberless "battles" in this film, all filmed in confuse-O-vision™, and in every last one of them it's actually impossible to tell the autobots from the decepticons. I don't think, as many other reviewers apparently do, that this is an accident of Bay's "frenetic style" or the "whiplash editing". I think it's 100% intentional and not a byproduct at all. The film is saying, in effect, "Don't bother yourself with moral considerations, or following a narrative, or investing emotionally in character arcs. In fact, there's no point in even telling the combatants apart. What matters is (ooof!) there's big shiny (crash!) things beating each other up (kapow!) on screen. During one of the talky bits, go get another coke."
In fact, everything about this heap of shit says "fuck you" to the audience, and there will come a day when even the dopiest among us will tire of such treatment. That day may not be far off. While this movie has plenty of morons who claim to have thought it was "fun", there were many more who got the hint that they were being insulted. Children—ritalin-addled, always-entertained modern children—walked out of this thing thinking they'd been had. Parents by the truckload began to rue the day Bay was born, and though they shelled out the cash all the same, they became just a little bit less likely to do it again next time.
Indeed, I hate this film so much I actively despise anyone who likes even a part of it. My plan is to dedicate the rest of my life to building a time machine, so I can go into the future and get the technology to reanimate the dead. I will then take my time machine, go back to the present, and resurrect Bruce Lee, so I can get him to kick Michael Bay in the junk. Then Bruce and I will go back in time, find Bay's father, and Bruce will kick him in the junk, repeatedly, until he can't make babies anymore and then we won't have to worry about Bay being born and making these terrible movies.
I'll let you know how it goes.