The Haute Critique on Spout

I remember seeing the first trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (T2:ROTFL?) in the theater. It was loud, and that was the best I could say. Everything that followed that first impression accelerated expectations in a death spiral.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one, Reviewers around the world sharpened their pencils and got jiggy with it, sometimes with magnificence.

”’Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Few elements of Fallen are completely odious unto themselves, but rolled together it becomes a wave of inescapable proportions – a literal tsunami of shit.” – Rob Humanick, The Projection Booth

“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing and frat boy assholery.” – David Cornelius, eFilmCritic

“If it sounds as though the script was written in serial-novel form during an all-night mescaline bender, well, I have no evidence that it was not.” – Chrostopher Orr, The New Republic

“I know there are still 17 months to go, but I’m thinking Transformers 2 has a shot at the title Worst Movie of the Decade.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

All of this piling on, however, pales in comparison with the masterpiece spawned on io9. Charlie Jane Anders drops the mother lode of a review, defending Transformers as a subtle work of post modern art. The truth is, it is her review that is art. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. For now, let me quote a few choice moments.

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.

LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he’s not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen’s prostate that somehow achieved sentience.

And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox’s lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

…part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or “ghetto” robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their “schmear” and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let’s go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you’ll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie’s pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You’ll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd’s screams of excitement.

…after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you.

Then there is Megan Fox’s own contribution. She’s dropping quotes to Entertainment Weekly like:

People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting. Once you realize that, it becomes almost fun because you can go, ‘All right, I know that when he calls action I’m either going to be running or screaming, or both.

Then speaking of her stardom as a result of her attitude:

I think if I had been a typical Hollywood actress and I said all the right things and I had been a publicity android, it wouldn’t have escalated to this level.

And then ludicrous stuff:

I don’t understand why people don’t have a f—ing sense of humor. Always assume that I’m being sarcastic. Like when I said those things about High School Musical. I didn’t really mean that it’s about pedophilia. But if you get high and you watch it, that is what that f—ing movie is about!

Q: Did you watch that high?
A: Yes, and it blew my mind.

With the stage set between a phalanx of reviews and this faint glimmer of self awareness from Fox, I strapped on that adult diaper and dove headlong into Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen.

Ambition is certainly not lacking from this picture. We start, just like Kubrick’s 2001, with pre-sapien hominids. This grandiose wankery permeates what is otherwise a pretty straight forward Saturday morning caliber story line.

Spoiler Warning (like you really care.)

Many reviewers claim the plot is impenetrable, but it is really quite simple. There is some bad **** Decepticon buried on Earth. He is going to destroy the sun, but there are two things in his way. First is that he can be killed by a ‘Prime’. Second, he needs a widget to do the dirty deed.

Of course, Optimus Prime is the last of the Primes, so they whack him. Then poor little Sam (La Boeuf), goes Beautiful Mind and is the only one in the universe that can find the widget. Oh yeah, and the widget can bring Optimus Prime back to life. A race ensues to decode Sam’s brain. The good guys get the stuff and bring Optimus Prime back to life and…

That’s right. Dot, dot, f’ing dot. Roll credits. The ever escalating boom and gloom, all heading for an anthropomorphic death battle of epic proportions, fizzles. Two and a half hours and they couldn’t even fit it in. Sure, OPrime gives you the hollow platitude at the end, but that’s it.

Maybe the baroque CGI mayhem (and there is enough that this might qualify as an animated feature) isn’t the point. In fact, not a single flickering frame catches the best performance and only reason to see the film, and that is the performance Megan Fox has been giving on the press tour.

The one thing that is mentioned in every review, no matter how snarky or scathing, is the fact that Megan Fox is quite the woodland nymph fairy. After being buried under a pile of men’s magazines rushing to crown her ‘Hottie #1’, she started doing interviews. The attention pointed at her has given her a chance to say some silly things, but also, to craft a persona out of her puttified male interviewers. She hasn’t quite got it all together, but it was enough, combined with my own private reasons, to try and summarize it in this set of clips.

Alone, these comments are fairly banal, but paired with this steaming heap of a movie and the drool drenched pages of every male targeted magazine, it starts to make sense. In some cases, is down right genius.

So, the final verdict is pretty straight forward. Under no circumstances allow yourself to be subjected to this movie sober. Terrible idea. Also, don’t see this movie unless you have a borderline obsession for Megan Fox. Blazing through this fiasco, one thing becomes evident. Her screaming and running, mixed in with her otherwise slutting it up fused her wicked, if sometimes annoying, off screen presence spins a seductive intrigue.

I don’t think this formula is unknown to the studio either. I’m pretty sure their accountants added it up. How many stoners are there? And how many people are obsessed with Megan Fox right now? Shit. This is going to be the biggest movie of all time.

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