Are you man enough?

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN

Directed!!! by MICHAEL BAY!!!!!!
Screenplay by those Star Trek guys
Starring More Giant Fighting Robots and Megan Fox

Reviewed by Matthew Brown
June 24 2009

"And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not." - Revelations 2:21

"The negative reviews on Transformers 2 have only heightened my arousal" - Matthew Brown, June 23 2009

There was trouble at the moviehouse tonight. The air conditioner in cinema 14 broke down at around 4:00 this afternoon without hope of repair. By our seating at 7:30 the theatre was a furnace, 30 degrees Centigrade, and it had accumulated the stink of manic fanboy the way a family station wagon inevitably ends up smelling of vomit. When Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen began to drip onto the screen at around 8:15, two men had been escorted out with fainting spells, and a small boy had commandeered the theatre's supply of ice and was selling it by the scoop for a quarter a go. He was up to sixty bucks, and it wouldn't last much longer. There was a rumble in the making.

There was a rumble in the making on screen, too. The filthiest desires of the fetid 12-year-old boysoul were staunchly fulfilled by the execrable-by-any-other-name piece of robogasm that was Transformers 1; what, then, could this Michael Bay character say for his sequel? Why, he swipes Lucas's old "faster, more intense" imprimatur, of course, and rewrites it as "FASTER, MORE INTENSE, MORE FIGHTING ROBOTS, AND WITH MORE RIVERS OF LUBRICANT-LIKE SWEAT RUNNING BETWEEN MEGAN FOX'S BOOBS."

How is it possible that Michael Bay has made a better film here than Transformers 1. Transformers 1 was the kind of giddy slapdash unnaturalness that feels "right" only to Toronto transit employees and sodomites. Good fucking lord it was fun - I don't remember a movie so resolutely terrible being so goddamned great at the same time since I first laid eyes on the original Supergirl in 1984.... and that movie had Faye Dunaway using the Barundi wand to send Supergirl to hang out with Lawrence of Arabia in a black room drinking booze out of a Windex bottle for half an hour.

Transformers 2, though, kicks the balls off the thing. Oh sure, it's still dumb as fuck, ludicrous, six and a half hours long, and the single most blithely racist film made by an American since Birth of a Nation, but otherwise, it's... good?

The film is escalation on every level. There is more of every goddamn thing. Given only an hour and a half last winter in which to write a 600 page screenplay before the iron door of the writer's strike came crashing down, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman wrote everything. They wrote fifty or sixty Transformers. They wrote three distinct instances of dogs fucking. They wrote Devastator. They wrote the ruins in Petra from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They wrote Sam's mom getting high on pot brownies. They wrote a cranky-as-fuck old Scottish Transformer who morphs out of an SR-71 Blackbird and proceeds to steal the movie in the one scene in Bay's entire canon which might legitimately be called "inspired." They even wrote an opportunity for Rainn Wilson to walk into a classroom, glare at a crowd of students, and bark out a two-word summation of Orci and Kurtzman's entire 2009 epoch: "SPACE! TIME!"

Well you can't have it both ways, people of the Earth. You can't say that the only good thing about Transformers 1 was the robots, and then complain about Transformers 2, where nearly everything but the robots has been chainsawed bloodily out.

It's a gusher, this one, but it works. It's a substantial improvement on almost every level: the plot could almost be called a plot; the boneheaded comedy scenes have a loose improvisational edge that is occasionally somewhat funny; the filmcraft on more than one occasion actually manages to convey what the fuck is going on. It's almost a real film.

Michael Bay - who is still disconcertingly unaware that he is the mainstream cinema's greatest fetishist, and that every image he lenses betrays a toxic wellspring of obsessive, neurotic sexual insecurity, no doubt due to his having a hair-trigger orgasm and/or the arousal mechanism of a three-toed sloth - remains painful to watch, but for new reasons. The man's camerawork is sad. Like, WALL-E sad; like, I'm-gonna-be-alone-for-the-rest-of-my-life-on-this-deserted-ball-of-rock sad. Stomping like a five year old, he has apparently become tired of the great money shots of his Transformers transforming (only three Transformers ever do, and when they do, they do it so close to camera that you might as well be having your face pushed through a tub of Lego bricks), but he has certainly not tired of pitting those robots against each other in endless melees of steel-driven orgy porn. And he has certainly not tired of his leading lady.

Bay singles out Megatron Fox as an even greater lust object this time than last. Having previously installed a glistening pudendal vale dripping aromatic musk-honey in the middle of the girl's chest, Bay ups the ante for his sequel by shrewdly adding the earthy tang of ass-sweat. He dotes on Fox's apple bottom six or seven times, begging us to peel it open and dive in, while continuing to indulge in what must be his very favourite stage direction, "Megan - run towards the camera - really slowly - and could you loosen your bra?" The climax of the film alone has a dozen such occurences, which stop the action completely and deflate any sense of momentum or tension, but really let you see the thing. Go watch the flick in IMAX, if you can. I hear Optimus Prime, in IMAX, is life-sized, and Megan's breasts, nearly so.

But, as stalker man-boys do, Bay soon tires of straight-up idolatry, and brutally demeans Fox for repudiating his gaze. He makes her beg for it, stands her up, wrestles her into the weak position in her relationship with that pencil-necked geek Shia LaBeauf. Bay fucks her with his camera over and over again till she is lying face-down in another man's crotch. He even makes Fox seem positively normal-looking by cheating on her with the six-fingered wraith he finds to play the "other woman" at Sam's university, a woman so demonically plastic and unreal that when Bay gets himself off by lingering on a single of her honey-dripping ass, only to reveal a glittering metal prong snaking its way out from under her oh-so-artfully-tenuous cotton panties, and thereby finally bringing together the complex web of metal-lust and flesh-fear that runs riot through every frame of his work, our orgasmic relief must equal his.

Lookit, if this isn't what a Transformers movie is supposed to be like, I don't know what people want out of this thing. It's clear from the very first scene, wherein the Autobots team up with the American military to kick the shit out of a few bad robots in Shanghai. The scene moves fast, looks great, sounds phenomenal, and features giant robots fighting each other, and a genuine feeling of kickass. I never really drank the Kool-Aid on Transformers as a lad (but wait till you see my G.I.Joe review), so maybe I'm missing some sense of the mythic grandeur of the franchise, but is it ... just ... possible... that this story is only ever about robots who transform into cars, and the action scenes they get into? When five construction vehicles come together to form the brutal, slobbering Devastator, and then proceed to climb up a pyramid to unleash a doomsday weapon that will wipe out the sun, while Megatron and Starscream look on, and Optimus Prime shows up with a cool new jet pack, it sure seemed like the genuine article to me.