Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Directed by Michael Bay

By Tony Sheppard
Capitol Weekly

Describing this movie is an almost pointless exercise. It’s not going to be seen—or not seen—because of what critics think, or based on minor details like logical storytelling and plot coherence (or the lack thereof). It’s a movie that will be raved about by fanboys and by those who just dig 150 minutes of sequentially coordinated but also oddly disjointed special effects. In that regard, it’s a visual orgy of arbitrary excess.

That arbitrariness often comes in the form of clashes between the signature “alien robots” with no real sense of logic as to who is likely to win in any such encounter. That the Autobots win more on balance than the Decepticons seems to have very little foundation other than the old movie phenomenon that suggests that good guys are stronger and shoot straighter than bad guys. We are somewhat reliably informed that Optimus Prime (a juggernaut of a good guy) is going to win any reasonably fair fight, which makes one wonder if it’s really that fair, but you could reverse the outcome of almost any other clash without really affecting much or noticing the difference.

You’d have to watch the movie at about quarter speed to actually pay close attention to the robots as they make their extraordinarily complicated transformations from vehicles or appliances to hyper-articulated fighting machines. There isn’t an ounce of subtlety in the movie – not that any is expected from either the material or the director. The first sight of Megan Fox, for example, is in short shorts, from behind, as she stretches across a custom motorcycle. If she’s the objectified object of lust, and she is, then most of the other characters are just as broadly painted archetypes.

This is a movie that stalls in the midst of a headlong quest for the ultimate weapon for an unlikely romantic interlude, and which can somehow take us through the back wall of the Air and Space Museum directly into an airplane graveyard somewhere in the desert. It’s clearly more of a commercial for the US military and Chevrolet than for Mapquest or MENSA. But Shia gets sweaty, Megan gets skimpy, his parents provide moderately comic relief, robots share b-movie witticisms as they pound on each other, and many, many, many things explode. And those are what will ultimately matter as it takes the box office crown for a week or two.