And here I thought my son Luke (almost 9 years old) had the best film review of Transformers: Rise of the Fallen when he responded to my inquiry about what the movie was about with the succinct reply,“Blowing stuff up”. But despite my nepotistic instincts, I am forced to admit that “Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie” is without a doubt the best review of the TROTF. In fact, it may be the best movie review… ever!
Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers’ worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.Oh, and I would warn you that there’ll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I’m not sure how much I can spoil it.
Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
And it goes on, one wicked paragraph after another. Written by Charlie Jane Anders at the website io9.
CJA, I salute you!
H/T to Ryan Lewis and John Martin for forwarding the link.
Well, at least you're going to the target audience when seeking to understand the phenomenom that is "Transformers II."
Just today I was thinking about "Transformers II" and some of the previous commentors musings. And the more I think about it, the more I harken back to the appeal of animated cartoon series like "Spiderman" and "GI Joe," not "Transformers" because I NEVER watched that series.
BUT what those 1/2 hour animated series were all about was setting up the "big fight": Spidey vs. Doc Ock, GI Joe against Cobra.
And I THINK the Transformer's movie moreless follows that. How to set up a fresh sequence of robot-on-robot fight scenes.
No real plot, just how can we showcase the transformers, and build up enough empathy or disdain for them, so as to get an audiece hot for a "robot-on-robot" bout when the bell rings.
Just a thought, please run that by Luke, I'd like to know how I did.
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
Er, EC, did you fail to realize that this review is satirical and in no way laudatory?
The movie's a "phenomenon" the way a giant tub of oversalted popcorn is a "meal" — something to stuff yourself with at the time, but hardly a culinary masterwork, and completely forgettable afterward.
Nothing personal, I'm glad you enjoyed yourself… but let's not pretend it's anything but junk food — the same kind of empty-calorie candy rotting Hollywood's teeth.