Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
Review: Lachlan Marks
When I was five years old, I used to follow my mother around the kitchen while she constructed bakery treats. Whenever she wasn’t looking, I’d take my face out of the icing bowl and increase the amount of my favourite ingredients in the mix. I was always impressed with the results. I became so cocky about my own ability as a chef that I confronted her one day about a vision I’d had for the ultimate scone. Unchained from the oppression of the recipe book this scone would be twice the size of it’s brothers, contain a yet untested fusion of delicious sugar and salt - what could possibly go wrong? – and live beneath a two inch thick blanket of chocolate and strawberry icing. Oh and I would pour every variety of food colouring into the mix, which would no doubt result in a rainbow glow that would mirror the rich spectrum of flavours contained within. Plus, I’d be sticking sultanas EVERYWHERE.
After a month of harassment, she finally relented and watched in horror as I went about putting together my masterpiece, shushing her at any point when she attempted to offer advice. An hour later I emerged from a cloud of smoke and flour clutching a tray containing the first batch of my heavenly creations. I waltzed straight past the sighs of my parents and next door to see the neighbour’s daughter, Kate. With the first bite, the eyes lit up on my fellow pre-schoolers face. They were fucking awesome. There was no doubt about it. I crammed the remainder of my stash into a Tupperware container and unknown to my parents took them along to their Sunday tennis match and started handing out these goodies to their friends. Most quietly obliged (and no doubt turfed the remainder once out of my sight) but one of my Dad’s friends, looked down through his enormous academic beard and said, “ Son this is terrible!” In reality, my ultimate scone was nothing more than poorly camouflaged Playdo and he made sure I knew it. So what the fuck does that have to do with Transformers you say? Well I pass on to the current critics beating this film death what I wish I’d had the foresight to say to my bearded oppressor all those years ago: did you really think something made by an enthusiastic 5-year-old for an enthusiastic 5-year-old was going to appeal to you?
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is a film for idiots by idiots. The question: are you an idiot? If not, are you willing to wear an idiot suit for two-and-a-half hours? This is the one for people who thought The Dark Knight had “too much talking”. While most will scoff at this, there are very few people out there who haven’t entertained the notion of film that contains nothing but the good bits: all icing, no cake. Because of his track record of putting piles of money in peoples bank accounts, Michael Bay is given free reign to live out this childhood fantasy. A valid argument might be that he has already been doing this for years but that’s only if you haven’t seen this sequel: excess on excess with double chocolate-coated cherries for eyes. For the first two thirds of the film you are watching a rehash of the original, albeit with even more graceless and annoying characters. Shia LeBouf is going to college, Megan Fox isn’t. A ton of webcam sex is feverishly prepared for.
Mum and Dad are freaking out about losing their only son and his transforming yellow car, Bumblebee, is treated like the much loved Labrador that just can’t be brought along to the dorm room. Isabelle Lucas rocks up to show that it is possible to wear more fake tan and lipgloss than Megan Fox and tries to get a hold of Shia’s magical metal shard. Then some robots try to steal the sun and somehow our couple is reunited with the addition of John Turturro and a conspiracy theorist hunk ripped out of college before magically arriving in Egypt for a full-on robots-on-pyramids war.
This third act is where things get out of control. Here’s where the valid criticism truly kicks in; Bay does throw non-descript metal at the camera for an hour. Up until then you’ve received a serving of cheese-soaked half-jokes, the continued awkward anthropomorphization of transport vehicles (the jet that turns into an aging Brit with a walking stick is woeful), unsightly product placement and way-too-close-to-the-camera-to-understand-what-the-fuck-is-going-on grandiose action scenes. But that’s what you signed on for. The end is where it falls apart but, to its credit, is best described as preposterous and mindnumbing rather than boring. It’s hard to think about the outside world and the greater pressures of life when your senses are being savaged by carnage and cleavage.
Yes, the moviemaking community is living in fear that this kind of filmmaking could become the norm. Let’s not forget that The Dark Knight sits as the second highest grossing film of all time. It’s gonna be okay, both flavours of blockbuster can and will survive in the same arena. You are not going to get a masterpiece out of a cash-in on alien robot car toys. If anything this film gets closer to the spirit of the cartoon, detaching itself from the need to set up shop in the real world and make the premise believable.
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen’s faults are many, but the crappy love story and attempts at humour are only half-arsed and therefore don’t serve as the kind of distractions that can tear you out of a film (see Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and X-Men Origins: Wolverine). You know this stuff has to be there but it's not thankfully not given the time to truly develop. C'mon, Bay knows what he’s here for: mangling landscape. It’s our guilty pleasure and it’s all he’s good for. Comments from critics like Ebert about the apocalyptic nature of this film - that a blockbuster of this magnitude may never be seen again – are founded but, like my ultimate scone, I just wanted to see how it would turn out and couldn't be convinced NOT to try it. I now know it’s not something I want to do again (I’m sure this goes for the people I poisoned at the tennis match, as well as the thousands of disgruntled critics across the world who watched this film) but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of seeing it come to life, even if the ultimate result was garish and hard to digest.
