'Transformers 2' Is A Terrible Movie

Rating: 1 star out of 5

It's not even July yet, but I have to declare the 2009 summer movie season a failure. I suppose it's too much to expect every summer to be like 2008, where we got two certified masterpieces ('The Dark Knight' and 'WALL-E'), plus a slew of other solid entertainments. But this summer has been a major letdown. There have been a few good ones ('Star Trek', 'Up', 'Drag Me To Hell'), but the bad side of things has been downright abysmal. 'Wolverine' and 'Terminator: Salvation', two of the season's biggest tentpoles, were limp, poorly executed affairs where we had to watch two very gifted actors waste their talents on muddled actioner schlock. Pieces of shit like 'Land of the Lost' and 'Year One' continued the descent of lewd ADD comics that kickstarted last year when Mike Meyers killed his career with 'The Love Guru'.

But now there's 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,' a $250 million studio buster and likely the biggest movie of the summer. And it's awful. I mean balls-to-the-wall, in-your-face, what-were-they-thinking terrible. The entire thing is like having a five-year-old kid scream cartoon songs while putting a metal pot over your head and hitting it with a baseball bat. The visuals are certainly stunning, as you'd expect from ILM, but the sequences come so often and last for so long without serving the story than they becomes just a mess of colors and sounds that eventually puts you to sleep. Oh, and it's racist (saving that for another post).

It's an old adage in Hollywood that big budgets make it harder for a filmmaker to create a great film. With seemingly unlimited resources, directors aren't forced to gut-check every little decision. They don't have to utilize their creativity to cut corners and wisely pick and choose what to cut and what to keep. In the case of 'Transformers 2', you get the impression that whatever godawful thought popped into Michael Bay's head ended up on the screen. There was no filtering process, no forced precision in the rewrites. Any unnecessary, bombastic, idiotic thing that crossed him mind got enough money behind it to become reality. And thus we have 'Revenge of the Fallen', a two and a half hour sensory rape that appeals to the knee-jerk brain spasms of our attention-deficient culture. The theater I was in loved the damn thing. I mean fucking loved it. I guess I'm the one that's out of touch. Silly me.