I remember when the first Transformers live-action movie was announced. My reaction was a mixture of "Cool!" and "It's going to be lame".
Transformers arrived and was better than anyone could have expected.
The problem with this is that
Transformers showed us that a decent Transformers movie was possible. It wasn't perfect by any means, but the robots were badass and believable and it didn't completely suck.
Enter
Revenge of the Fallen. It didn't completely suck, either, but this is the movie that I feared from way back when.
Why is that? This movie is focused on humans to the point that the robots get short shrift. Most of the robot cast gets maybe one line of dialogue. Two if they are lucky. The human characters, including the general (or whatever he is) and the bozo from the government get fleshed out characters (for what they are). They are completely forgettable, but they get easily ten times the screen time of, say, Ironhide. Or Arcee. Or Sideswipe. Or 90% of the robots.
What's worse is that this movie
does suck at mythology, which is what keeps Transformers interesting and in the hearts and minds of nerds everywhere.
Consider G1. NPR did a story yesterday where they said the cartoons of that era (including Transformers and G.I. Joe) were terrible. I think they ought to be reevaluated, because the Transformers cartoon did a fantastic job of creating a universe and a mythology.
Contrast that to this movie, which is a mishmash of the Da Vinci Code and a bunch of Primes who are Julie Taymor rejects. The Fallen -- created and dispatched in this movie -- can't even aspire to Darth Maul status. The whole thing is unbelievable, silly, and uninspiring. After the last movie,
this is the best they can do? The cartoon did far more with far less resources.
The proof of this is evident to anyone who saw the animated Transformers movie in the theatres. If you were there, you
felt it when Prime died. Even if you knew it was going to happen, you felt that hurt, that shiver, that lump in your throat.
Now take a look at this movie. They kill Prime, and no one but
ing Shia LaBeouf gives a shit. None of the other Autobots even talk about it. I am tempted to call this movie
Transformers: Going Through The Motions. Why was Prime alone? Why didn't anyone think of resuscitating him with an AllSpark shard? Right, I wasn't going to talk about plot. And this makes it clear why: it's pointless. It isn't about a coherent story. It's about getting from point A to point B and blowing stuff up in between.
The only emotional core to this movie is with the
ing Witlesswickies, which shows how bad off it is. No one gives a
about Sam's parents. The movie would have been improved immensely if Jetfire had sat on their house at the beginning of the movie and squished all the puny flesh creatures.
This is a gigantic problem. Even the cartoons treat the robots as characters. Here, the only robots that have personalities are Mudflap and Skids (who are indistinguishable), Bumblebee (who can't talk), Prime (who is dead for most of the movie), and, briefly, Megatron, Starscream, and The Fallen. Megatron is neutered by being number two to someone we never really get to know. Starscream snivels but is never half as threatening as his G1 inspiration. And that's about it for the robots.
This movie's most developed (robot) characters are Skids, Mudflap, and Wheelie. Chew on the implications of
that for a minute. Fallen, indeed.
Revenge of the Fallen isn't awful. It has plenty of CGI, some of the sequences (such as Shanghai) are actually really good. But it wastes so much time on the boring (anything Witwicky) and the inconsequential (Sam's roommate, the various humans who showed up to collect a paycheck).
It's salvaged only by the wicked cool CGI and action sequences. These are eminently watchable and transformative (in more ways than one) and provide the only real reason to see this movie.
It also strikes me that this movie is at once respectful of the Transformers legacy and, at the same time, extremely wrong-headed. We hear about the Matrix and sparks, we hear Soundwave and see Devestator. It's clear that someone is writing for the fans.
At the same time, it's just...wrong. It strikes me that this was written by someone who watched the Transformers animated movie and then decided what every Transformers fan wanted was to be the person who rescued Prime.
News flash: we were affected when Prime died (in the
other movie). But that doesn't mean we wanted to turn this into some puny flesh creature hero epic.
No. We are going to a movie about Transformers because we want to see giant robots who transform.
They should be the
center of the movie. Not some dork and his porn-ready girlfriend, embarassing parents, and humping dogs.
I mean, John Turturro is a nice guy and a good actor, but what the hell is he doing in this film? Pointless. Every moment spent on him is a moment that isn't telling me about Arcee or Jolt or the Constructicons or why any of them are doing what they're doing.
Why did the Fallen go bad? Does Soundwave ever come down to Earth? I could go on and seem like an even bigger nerd, but the point is that the humans are, by and large, terminally boring and a waste of screen time. I understand that it can't be all robots all the time, but it seems to me that a movie about Transformers ought to have them as the centerpiece, the reason for being, the heart.
There's no heart to this movie. It's all witless gunk about Sam, capped off by a battle in the recycled desert (hopefully Bay got a discount for using it twice) with reused Decepticons, many of which were indistinguishable.
This comes off far more harsh than I intended, but I do think that the movie failed on a lot of levels that it could have succeded on, but chose not to pursue. The CGI brings the robots to life: too bad the movie couldn't do the same.
