Michael Bay is a 15 year old boy trapped in a man’s body (and in the ’90s). He gets older, his movies stay the same age. I don’t know why I keep seeing his movies. I guess it is because when I was 15 I saw The Rock and it rocked (sorry) my 15-year-old little brain that desired nothing but violence/sex/wreckage/fast cars and had no time for character development, real-life situations, or dialogue. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Revenge of the Fallen is for one of two groups: A) 15 year old boys (or anyone with the mental capacity of a 15 year old boy), and B) people who are willing to forgo their dignity to publicly oggle over Megan Fox and Isabel Lucas for 2 hours (actually this is just another way of describing group A).

If you refer to the image I have conveniently included above, you will see a snapshot of exactly what this movie is: Shia is intense and scared, Megan is slightly less intense and scared and her breasts are half exposed, and they are surrounded by wreckage and GM cars. If that is what you want out of life then GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR! Also when you’re done seeing Transformers rent the movie Idiocracy and tell me if you “get it” or not. You won’t.

SPOILER

In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (“T2″ henceforth) the Autobots (good guys) have been fighting along side the same army guys from the first Transformers (Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson) for 2 years against the remaining Decepticons in order to purge them from the Earth. Shia goes to college and the comic relief his parents are sad and also so is the eye candy his BFF/GF Megan from the first T’frmrs who works at an auto shop around grease monkey douche bags and is inappropriately dressed and extremely hot and is not ever messed with or looked at by any of these guys because that’s realistic. Shia finds a shard from The Cube which gave life to all the TFRMRS but was destroyed in the first one and gets secret codes imprinted onto his brain and is now the key to Megatron’s resurrection and also the savior of the world, which means the Autobots have to keep him safe and the Decepticons want to find him and extract his knowledge and kill him and steal the shard so they can re-ignite a machine hidden under the Pyramids in Egypt that they started building 20,000 years ago which is capable of shooting the Sun and blowing it up, which is their ultimate goal (because it’s possible to blow up a star). But even though all that sounds like it’s really important, what’s more important in the movie is how Megan is sad because Shia won’t say he loves her despite the fact that they are both still teenagers and their relationship is based solely on the extreme circumstances of the first Transformers (the movie Speed already taught us relationships started in this manner never last) and also despite the fact that he’s going away to college to live in a co-ed dorm filled with the absolute hottest women ever gathered into one building, the hottest of which, Isabel, immediately attacks him and gets him into bed his second day. One other thing, every car in the movie, even the ones in China and the Middle East, are obviously and conspicuously made by GM (except the Decepticon cars, they are made by German car companies).

The Good

The graphics were done by Industrial Light & Magic. Also, I have to give it to T2 in the sound editing department. Just like T1, I was blown away by the very imaginative and powerful sound effects. I know that doesn’t seem like something that could make a movie good, and believe me I have never noticed sound effects in a movie before, but if you watch the opening credits where the Dreamworks and Paramount logos are shown you will know what I mean. Some of the surround speakers way in the back in the movie theater had to do things I don’t think they’ve ever had to do. They were suddenly shouting “THIS IS WHY WE WERE MADE!” to each other across the room and giggling hysterically at 20,000 Hz.

The Bad

You know how when you go to a wedding and you don’t really know or like anyone and it’s really awkward and there is no alcohol and it’s in a really bad facility but you go through the buffet line and amidst all the terrible food there are those little cocktail weenies that you really like, and when people ask you how the wedding was you respond “well, they had those cocktail weenies” and by that they know what you really thought of it since that’s the only thing you can say? Well the sound effects mentioned above are the cocktail weenies of T2 (I wish I thought of another word besides “weenies”).

T2 was the most ridiculously unrealistic movie since Tomb Raider. Nothing in this movie ever has or will happen on our planet or any other. I sat there trying to figure out what exactly goes through Michael Bay’s mind on a daily basis. He’s literally like a dog who sees a squirrel and then a bone and then a fire hydrant all at the same time and then has no other reaction but to bark out of sheer sensory overload and that bark became this movie. Except at least squirrels and bones are real things that exist.

First of all let’s look at the premise of blowing up the Sun. It is so shallow to believe that ultimate evil only exists to just wipe us out and exterminate us. That, to me, is a 15-year-old boy’s view of evil. How does it benefit the Decepticons to extinguish the Sun? The movie does not explain any benefits they will receive from this. They just go from solar system to solar system blowing up Suns and that is why they exist. OK. Also, Michael Bay might want to do a little reading and realize that the Sun is, by definition, a perpetual nuclear explosion happening all the time. You can’t explode an explosion that big without just adding to it and making it stronger, thus doing the opposite of what you were trying to do. Also it is not large enough to create a supernova when it finally dies, so it’s not like that’s a plausible mechanism that can be artificially triggered by the Decepticons. The machine they want to use to kill the Sun is inside the Pyramid of Giza, which is about 700 feet long by 400 feet high. This covers but an infinitesimal fraction of the Earth’s surface. You can fit 1.3 million Earths inside the sun. MILLION. How in the world is this tiny machine supposed to dominate the power of the Sun? Luckily, 15-year-old boys don’t like school and thus don’t like science class and thus don’t care to be bothered by these types of explanations.

That is only one example of how this movie completely lacks physical realism of any kind. None of the maneuvers that the robots or human machines make are doable in real life – they would simply break with that amount of force applied (I don’t care how technologically advanced they are, the laws of physics still apply). Shia is again thrown 40 feet in the air multiple times and never breaks a bone. A large, sharp metal transformer with spikes and tenticles climbs forcefully through his mouth into his brain and ravages around to find information and comes back out and Shia doesn’t have the slightest bit of brain damage as a result (or even pain for that matter). Everyone in the movie experiences things that would put normal people into shock, but no one seems to be at all affected by any of it – they just keep going through the movie like super heroes. I wish they would’ve called this movie Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen In A World Full Of Regular Looking People Who Are Also Super Heroes.

I have never seen a group of more eccentric people in a movie. Dwight from The Office makes a cameo as a college professor who very conspicuously includes sexual innuendo in every other word of his lecture directed specifically at the freshmen girls in the front row, and this is done WHILE THE DEAN IS WATCHING and he is not fired and nobody says a word.

When Shia’s mom drops him off at college she eats some reefer brownies from a random student which are in a plastic bag with A LARGE MARIJUANA LEAF IMAGE ON IT and somehow didn’t realize what she was eating. She proceeds to act extremely drunk and belligerent which doesn’t make sense because she didn’t eat vodka brownies she ate reefer brownies. I guess 15-year-old boys are more prone to begin experimenting with alcohol than weed at that age and thus think that being high is just like being drunk and that would explain how this scene appealed to them?

(sorry that image doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about)

A government official comes in and decides that the Autobots need to leave Earth even though they have been protecting us for 2 years because he is a politician and somehow he has the power to tell the Autobots to leave the entire planet instead of just America. Josh Duhamel later throws this government official off a plane at 30,000 feet and doesn’t get reprimanded since it is understood that even though he was still directly appointed by the president to oversee this operation, he was “a bad dude” and really everyone could see it if they looked hard enough.

Two of the Autobots (“The Twins”) are all rusty and old and so they simply drive into a garage and park next to two Scion-looking GM cars and the camera rotates and they magically become replicas of these cars because Transformers don’t just transform they BECOME ANYTHING THEY WANT JUST BY PARKING NEXT TO IT.

John Turturro from T1 who now works in a meat shop goes into his basement and has all the secret government files they need to find and defeat the Decepticons but no one else has these files or knowledge.

Megan trains a Decepticon like a dog and he ends up becoming good because he is attracted to her and eventually humps her leg even though he’s a Decepticon robot.

Megan, Shia, and John Turturro take a tazer gun into the National Air and Space Museum and break in and take down all the guards and cause wreckage and devastation to the priceless exhibits for hours and then go outside and draw symbols in the dirt for a few more hours and NO ONE EVER FINDS OUT OR CALLS THE COPS.

Do you seriously want me to keep going? Are you sure because that’s maybe 10% of the unrealistic things in this movie. I’m literally blown away by the amount of time I spent sitting in the theater thinking how blatantly unrealistic the movie was. At one point I looked around and saw several grown adult men glued to the edge of their seats and audibly cracking up at Michael Bay’s trademark genius one-liners.

This is not an exaggeration: more than one of the Autobots were voiced by what sounded like Eddie Griffin and existed solely to fill the token black guy bout-it bout-it funny man spot that all Micheal Bay movies create for themselves and then fill in with these annoying types of characters. I mean it was ridiculous when I sat back and processed what I was seeing. Large, majestic transformers suddenly bumbling around the screen saying things like “Aw sh*t, this was a bad idea” and “Boy you betta shut yo face for I bust it up, b*tch” and “Man look at this jerry-curl scrub – it’s like he’s got a porcupine on his head, yo!”

If you think what I just typed is at all an exaggeration or a joke, please go see T2 and come back and visit my blog and write your comment which will say something like “You warned me and I didn’t believe you. I will listen to you and believe you from now on. I am sorry.” You will be forgiven since your punishment was to see this movie.

The Beratings

Acting – One person in this movie was decent, and that was Aaron Pierce from the 24 TV series as the commander of the army. Everyone else was terrible. Megan was terrible. Tyrese Gibson was terrible and he only had 3 lines. For heaven’s sake John Turturro wasn’t even that good. It’s like his acting ability was purposefully stifled. I have to give this movie 2 Beratings for acting.

Plot – Like any sequel that is forcefully spewed out as quickly as possible following a blockbuster, this one had no plot because the first one didn’t leave any room for a second movie. There was no integration and the two films felt totally disconnected, and thus the plot for the sequel was picked out of thin air and felt totally forced the whole time. 2 Beratings.

Inconsistencies – Optimus Prime sacrificed himself to destroy The Cube and killed Megatron and it was over. Oh wait Megatron wasn’t even injured, just shut down and had to be rebooted. Then Optimus Prime died and everyone mourned and it was over for him and the key that could have turned him back on exploded into dust but then it came back and he lived after Shia died also and went to a weird robot heaveNONE OF THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH ANYTHING. 2 Beratings.

Unbelievable Events – NINE HUNDRED BERATINGS. Shoot I can only give it 2. Ok, 2 Beratings.

Schematics – 1 Berating. Great sound, great visual effects. The soundtrack was just a copy + paste from The Rock/Armageddon/Transformers 1, but that alone isn’t enough to earn the movie a berating. No, I’m docking this movie because at least 68% of the scenes were shot in the terribly played-out Michael Bay style where the camera is circling the action in a grandiose way as to say “this is the greatest scene of any movie” whether the subject is Shia and Megan kissing or the Pyramid of Giza being destoyed or Optimus Prime standing valiantly on a hill or a GM car driving on a dirt road or a person sitting on a chair reading a book on a Sunday afternoon.

“Mike, how should we shoot this one?”
“Let me think… have we used the Helicopter Circling Shot yet?”
“Yes”
“Cool. Let’s use the Helicopter Circling Shot again.”
“You are all things perfect to me.”
“I am Micheal Bay.”
“I love you Micheal Bay.”
“Thanks, I do too.”

That dialogue that probably happened in the studio almost made me change my mind to 2 Beratings, but I will be kind since it’s Friday and only give it 1.

9/10 Beratings = Never watch it

0/10 Stand in line for the very first showing
1/10 See it the first weekend
2/10 See it at full price
3/10 See it at the Five-Buck-Club
4/10 See it at the dollar-fifty
5/10 See it OnDemand
6/10 Rent it from Blockbuster
7/10 Watch it on TV
8/10 Watch it purely for spousal points
>> 9/10 Never watch it
10/10 Buy it and publicly destroy it