Movie review: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”
Of all the reviews of the movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen — from the Daily Variety (“with machines that are impressively more lifelike, and characters that are more and more like machines”) to USA Today (“Bigger, louder, longer and more metallic is definitely not better”) to the THC’s “Risky Biz” blog (“Is ‘Transformers’ a neo-con screed in disguise?”), the best review on record, as far as I’m concerned, came from my almost 9-year-old son Luke. After sitting through the nearly 150 minute movie, I asked Luke what Transformers was about. His reply: “Blowing stuff up.”
How true. From the opening sequence through the final struggle, if there is one consistent narrative theme is that stuff gets blown up. Here is a partial list drawn from my battered memory cells:
18,000 year-old tribesman
An industrial park
Military amored vehicles
Highways
Roads
Overpasses
Soldiers
Cars
Sam’s bedroom
The kitchen in Sam’s house
Ceilings, walls, windows — and much of the rest of Sam’s house
Water fountain outside Sam’s house
Sam’s garage
Stuff inside Sam’s garage
College library
Sam’s dorm room
More cars
More streets
More overpasses
More industrial park structures
Trees, forest
General mayhem during worldwide assault including Paris
A submarine
An aircraft carrier
Every vehicle, plane, and soldier on the aircraft carrier
Military jets
Military tanks
Droid airplanes
The Pyramids
Egyptian village buildings
More soldiers
And lots and lots and lots and lots of robots
It’s true there are a few other things going on in this new version of Transformers including a dog humping another dog, the same dog humping the other dog again, a small robot humping the leg of Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), Sam’s mother getting high on marijuana brownies, innumerable shots of Ms. Fox’s bosom bouncing in slow-motion as she runs away — again and again — from danger, and for good measure, a (perhaps) 6-minute exposition scene in the middle of Act Two, which completely stops the movie in order to convey a mind-numbing recitation of facts.
But there were three messages I took away from seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:
1. Avoid women who are sexually aggressive because in the midst of carnality, you may well discover a robotic tail emerging from their hind quarters which they’ll wrap around your neck and proceed to fling you about the room.
2. Politicians are nothing more than egoistic bureaucrats who have no understanding of the ‘real’ world and who will, in fact, freak out when confronted with the least bit of actual danger.
3. If you want to sell a spec script in this marketplace — “Transformers on top with $390.4M” — you need to blow up a lot of shit… “blow it up real good.”
[Obscure reference to SCTV’s “Farm Report” with Billy Jim McBob (Joe Flaherty) and Billy Sol Hurock (John Candy) pictured above].
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