Imagine being pelted with flash bombs for two-and-a-half hours. Blinded, bloodied and potentially frightened, you'll attempt to open your eyes. Oh there's Megan Fox. You feel somewhat better, amongst other things, until she opens her mouth and tries to have a conversation with another sentient being and, oddly, you wish you were being punished by more seizure inducing effects. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn't just the must-see summer event. It's a testimony to where blockbuster filmmaking has gone: bloated, boring, with nary a single saving grace, director Michael Bay's latest love note to summer is one hot mess.
Criminally, Transformers 2 can not even be derided for the path that Bay has laid out for it because it lifts so much from past films from better directors. Taking key aspects from canonized Fanboy films such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Gremlins and Indiana Jones, Transformers fans should feel nostalgia for the 1986 animated feature film. At least then audiences knew what was unfolding on-screen. With a shameful disregard towards its final product, Bay and company have little more to present moviegoers than truckloads of explosive materials, Megan Fox looking sexy for the camera (how she kept her lipstick perfect while running from evil robots in the middle of a desert is beyond me) and the embarrassing comedy duo of Mudflap and Skids. Summer movies should be fun but not mindless and they should certainly not expect patrons to "check their brain at the door." One can have all the BOOM, hotness and amazing special effects they want but if the story is a mind-numbing waste of time, then the movie is an epic fail. Exhibit A: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Bay is hoping that you won't notice that in the void left by solid screenwriting, viewers just have Fox running in slow-motion and strutting around in jean cut-offs which look as natural as a Playmate during a photo-shoot.
Sam (Shia LaBeouf) is off to college but before he bids his girlfriend (Fox) adieu, he comes in contact with a shard of the All Spark, the mysterious stone from 2007's Transformers which bring mechanical devices to life. The rock inserts all of its secrets into Sam's mind, forcing the mild-mannered kid to have episodes of psychosis during class along with writing wacky symbols all over walls. He can also scribble out the symbols with cake icing with delicious consequences. The Decepticons need these secrets to help discover an ancient device that turns suns into energy to be used by the giant robots. Not only that, Decepticon leader Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving) is also bent on welcoming his master, The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd), the diabolical original Decepticon, to lead the effort against earth and its heroes.
Meanwhile, the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (still voiced by original animated series talent Peter Cullen) are collaborating with a covert operations military wing, code-named N.E.S.T, to hunt down Decepticons still on Earth. The team, made up of Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), have come under fire from the White House for -you guessed it- destroying cities and stuff. With meddling from typical bureaucratic numb-nuts, this time in the form of NSA advisor Galloway (John Benjamin Hickey), our alien/human alliance is on fragile ground.
The timing couldn't be worse.
While Sam and his arm-candy debate on who should say "I love you" first, the Decepticons are en route to perform a lobotomy on Sam, something the audience routinely feels during this film. As more and more, and a bit more secrets are revealed, the story leaps off the cliff of idiocy just in time for the final 30 minutes, which should have viewers pinching themselves to make sure they are actually watching this spectacle. In the end, that's all Transformers 2 is: an over-the-top spectacle, even by Michael Bay standards.
Bay's arrogance is staggering. Creating a movie with an absurd run-time (2.5 hours!) is a testimony to how proud he is of himself and his work. Plugging in iconic movies and hoping it appears as an homage is deplorable and outrageous. Even worse may be Bay's take on gender and race. The women in the film are used merely as something to ogle and laugh at, offering nothing redeeming to the overall story and certainly not strong enough to actually fight back. Fox's character is often seen obsessing over Sam with questions over love while his mother is lacking key mental faculties. Tyrese Gibson's character, the only African-American with a speaking role, is reduced to one-liners and looking pissed-off while Autobots Mudflap and Skids are awful caricatures of inner-city youth. Ramn Rodrguez, the only minority with more than a few sentences, plays Sam's roommate and is seen screaming the entire movie and doesn't offer much in way of bravery.
Oddly, Megan Fox said something profound. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, she said "This movie isn't about acting." True. It's also not about filmmaking.