Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Dir. Michael Bay

2009

150mins

Cert 12a

Transformers: ROTF is like bad pornography; simultaneously boring and obscene. It’s hard to imagine how a movie about asexual alien robots can be so nauseatingly, unrelentingly horny.

The first Transformers film was poorly scripted, plotted and acted, and featured huge, overly intricate robots pummeling eachother senseless in an orgy of cgi violence. And orgy is the right word for this hideous sequel. It’s like stumbling into a dimly lit hotel room and witnessing a bewildering jumble of vaguely recognisable body parts writhing around in a distorted heap. You can’t see what belongs to whom, and it’s impossible to tell what specifically is going on... but it’s clear that you need to get out. Fast.

Sam Witwicky (Shia Leboeuf, making a damn fool of himself), is preparing to leave home and start college. This means leaving behind his wacky parents, his pet Autobot Bumblebee, and his girlfriend Mikaela (popular sex object Megan Fox). The Autobots have their hands full too, cooperating with the human military to rid the world of the evil Decepticons. There’s a plot, swinging around uncontrollably, that involves the recovery of some object or other to prevent the destruction of the earth’s sun, but it’s nothing more than a pretext for over two hours of mindless robot-on-robot brawling and juvenile sexual imagery.

The Transformers are legion in this film, but are all indistinguishable from eachother. Every one of them looks like a wad of squashed paperclips, and when they decide to rumble (every few minutes), the camera lunges so violently into the midst of the action that it’s not even worth the effort to try to comprehend what’s going on. The robots aren’t the only victims of this ungodly thrusting of lenses and apertures; Fox, whose mouth is locked in a permanent pout for the duration of the film, is practically violated by the camera, which leers at her pneumatic body with all the subtlety of a frat boy in the girls’ locker room.

Why the heck is the film so oversexed? Sam and Mikaela are horny. Mikaela’s pet Decepticon is horny. Sam’s parents are horny. Sam’s parents’ dogs are horny. Soundwave, the Decepticon communications ‘bot, rapes an orbiting satellite. One colossal Transformer has wrecking balls for testicles, which he dangles cheerfully over the great pyramid of Giza. Seriously. The film shakes a pair of giant robot balls in the audience’s face. I think that pretty much says it all.

Maybe all this ball-shaking is the film’s way of compensating for something. The complete absence of characterisation, for example; the only Transformers to exhibit any distinguishing traits are miserable racial stereotypes - two jive-talking Autobots in particular are just appalling. As the ‘comic relief’, they lurch around spouting toe-curling ghetto speak and foul language. And oh yes, they’re illiterate and one has a protruding gold tooth! Good God.

Perhaps all the sex is to distract us from the film’s diabolical script - practically every line is a woeful clunker. Or it might be to distract us from the soundtrack, which blasts across the film as though every single scene is a climax. Or maybe the sex is linked to the film’s weird military fetish (do we really need to see the entire contents of the US army’s toy box?)

Crude, dumb and very long, Transformers: ROTF is a juvenile mess. If, walking blindly into the wrong movie theatre, you should find yourself transfixed by this baffling obscenity, just back out slowly and pretend that you didn’t see anything.

3/10

-James