epic fail

Yesterday afternoon I went to the new Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen. I tried to have an open mind going in, because even though the one review I had seen online was absolutely scathing, many of my facebook acquaintances had loved it. And it's generally okay for there to be a summer movie that's all about explosions, as long as it presents itself well.

But this movie was just bad. And not in a low-budget, slapped-together way that's merely not good. Movies that aren't good come out all the time and make their way quietly to the $5 bin at WalMart about a month after the initial DVD release. Then there those campy movies that poke fun at themselves by being intentionally bad. The Librarian springs to mind. I enjoy a movie like that, as long as it's clear that they aren't taking themselves seriously. And in a class all by themselves are those movies that are totally, monumentally bad in every way and are clearly taking themselves far too seriously the entire time. Transformers 2 is that movie. It's the sort of movie that makes me want to sing the opening song from The Producers as I walk out of the theater:

He's done it again
He's done it again
Max Bialystock has done it again!
We can't believe it
You can't conceive it...

How'd he achieve it?

It's the worst show in town!
We sat there sighing
Groaning and crying
There's no denying
It's the worst show in town!

Oh, we wanted to stand up and hiss...

We've seen shit...

But never like this!

Just substitute Michael Bay for Max Bialystock (ooh, ironic name similarities!) and the sentiment is the same.

If I were to detail to you the entirety of the badness of the movie, it would take all day and I would be giving it more time and publicity than it deserves. And I'm not concerned that everything I'm about to write is a major spoiler--if you haven't seen it yet I urge you not to waste your time or money (although, it could be fun to rent some day when you need a good laugh). So here's a short list of the top several reasons this movie fails:

1. Optimus Prime has the most over-dramatic dialogue of all time, and his final line has nothing to do with the movie.

2. Sam's mother is worse than a caricature--no human being could be that pathetically ridiculous. And making her get high off marijuana brownies when they move Sam to college is just in poor taste, although it did almost make me forget her over-the-top crying breakdown as they were packing to leave.

3. Sam's girlfriend Mikaela embodies every female stereotype I've ever heard of, which really shouldn't be possible, since so many of them are conflicting. She is at the same time flighty and clingy, needy and overly assertive, composed "warrior goddess" who takes on decepticons single-handedly and panicky girl who almost gets them killed by screaming. I realize her only real purpose is to distract the male members of the audience enough between explosions so that they don't realize how ridiculous everything is, but seriously, Bay could have at least picked her lines as carefully as he chose her clothing to allow for the maximum amount of boob jiggling without actually falling out.

4. Gratuitious shots of humping dogs are, by definition, gratuitous, and do absolutely nothing for the story. A miniature Decepticon doing the same thing to Mikaela's leg is even worse.

5. The super-hot robot chick is an impossibility unexplained by anything before or after the scene in which she appears and is subsequently killed. How is it that this one Decepticon can hide not as an automobile, but as a college co-ed? If she was that advanced, she should have been harder to kill. I think the only reason she got to be in the movie was so that the director could call for a shot up her skirt and justify it by using the angle to show her robot tail coming out.

6. The giant Decepticon does not need giant wrecking ball testicles. That just isn't funny.

7. You made Agent Simmons move in with his mother and become the random-ultra nerd-turned-hero? What? He wasn't cool enough in the first movie to get that part now, and the underwear shot that scarred me for life is so beyond unnecessary.

8. Sam's commitment issues are not cute. You may think it's resolved at the end, Michael Bay, but you are so wrong.

9. The Tomb of the Primes is two inches behind a 7th Century (maybe later, but certainly not earlier) Christian fresco in a random desert temple, and no one has found it before now? I don't think so. By the story's timeline, the Primes were there since 7000 BC, and I think whoever built the temple and later decorated it would have been rather more observant than that.

10. All the new Autobots are either completely flat characters or ethnic stereotypes. Not cool.

11. Were they trying to make Sam Witwicky into Harry Potter? They've got the teen angst and general outsider tendencies covered, easily. Add in a scene of him dead and talking with wise, departed ancients before returning to save the day, and all he needs to complete the similarity is glasses, a wand, real friends, a soul, a story that is complex and actually makes sense...

12. Optimus' final battle against the Fallen is over in 2 seconds. Really? The fallen is a Prime and can only be defeated by a Prime (hence the waiting on his diabolical plan until Optimus is out of the way), so shouldn't they be evenly matched enough to make a good battle sequence? All Optimus needs to defeat his fallen brother is a resurrection and some rocket boosters? After all the buildup, I expected more. For shame, Michael Bay, wasting a perfectly good opportunity to add more violence to a film that already involved more death, destruction and explosions than I would expect from 2012 (a new movie about the end of the world--the preview was before Transformers).

13. The overly dramatic chopper flyover with muted choir in the midst of battle as Sam "dies" was so overdone I almost burst out laughing. Clearly the director thinks this is a serious action movie with deep philosophical gems buried so deep only explosions of the highest magnitude can bring them forth.

I will admit that Sam's roommate was fun--Leo the conspiracy theory website guy was a good call and made me smile.

But the best part of the whole experience was probably seeing the new Harry Potter trailer. Now that's a movie that should not disappoint!

-Kim