I’ve calmed down.

I think.

But last night, after 10pm I needed a stiff drink or two. Or three. Movies don’t normally have that effect on me, but Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is no ordinary movie.

It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most bogglingly poorly sewn together and overblown pieces of cynical plotless nonsense I have ever seen, bar none. Genuinely I think Michael Bay said to them, “Hey, give me $200m and just let me go off and blow stuff up, it’ll be a surefire winner!!” and thus the deal was done.

The story really, genuinely, is such nonsense that I couldn’t be arsed trying to explain it or just how complex and full of made up bullshit it gets in the second half. I don’t remember it all anyway. There’s another energy source that they’ve made up after the one in the last film was destroyed, some evil dude on the far side of Jupiter, a machine to destroy the sun and a lo of incredibly poorly guarded Decepticon stuff allowig them to get back into the game. This is all sprinkled with poorly mashed up references to Gremlins, Power Rangers and BSG. Some of it looked like Indiana Jones, and with Shialebelebelebeouffff in it I started having flashbacks to the last Indiana Jones car crash. 

The story has holes so big you could drive Optimus Prime himself through them and, just a thought for future reference Michael Bay, A MOVIE ABOUT TWO SETS OF GIANT ROBOTS BEATING THE CRAP OUT OF EACH OTHER SHOULD NOT HAVE A STORY THAT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE TO FOLLOW!!!!!

I’m not committing any plot spoilers (there’d have to be a plot) when I tell you that for a lot of the time it’s hard to understand which mound of metal is beating up which other mound of metal, which element of gibberish militaryspeak is being sold to us or just what in the name of sweet baby Jesus is going on. Then, after investing 147 minutes of your life in it, the ending is such a damp squib that my friend sitting next to me zoned out for a moment and then said “Is that it, was that the ending?”.

Yup.

Not even Megan Fox running across the desert in a tight top (to the Baywatch theme tune in my head at least) did anything to redeem this example of everything that’s worst about modern, studio, big budget, summer sequel tentpole moviemaking. After an hour and a half a couple of us had lost the will to live, after TWO AND  HALF HOURS we were laughing hysterically and fighting our way through the crowd to get out.

Look, there are a few good points. I quite like the opening sequence in Shanghai when it looked like there might be the chance of some genuine invention in the action sequences (turns out later there isn’t any) and it is quite funny in places, but it’s impossible to believe that this was written by the same two guys who wrote Star Trek.

Yes, the robot fighting stuff is entirely realistic, apparently there are 8 billion moving parts (or something) in the CGI Autobots and Decepticons, but with that, and a lot of the gibberishspeak backplot nonsense that happens in the second half of the film, I could only but be reminded of George Lucas and The Phantom Menace.

Yes, Michael Bay, you’ve rendered each bolt on each fighting warcraft perfectly but you’ve left out everything else…

(Originally HERE)