Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen

After Iron Man, here comes anoth­er film that projects a fan­ta­sy of unfet­tered Amer­i­can pow­er in the Mid­dle East. This time it’s Jor­dan, where an air­craft car­ri­er unloads a car­go of tanks and sol­diers, and the smil­ing locals let peo­ple through check­points because they love that Nu Yoik accent. When did the block­buster become a form of social therapy?

Tak­en (ten­ta­tive­ly) on its own terms, Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fall­en prob­a­bly rep­re­sents some sort of mas­ter­piece. It’s a fren­zy of sound and fury that takes Michael Bay’s frame-fuck­ing ​‘vision’ to its final, eye-bog­gling extreme. There are times when the screen is so over­whelmed with kinet­ic, ado­les­cent ener­gy that the effect is a kind of Zen moment of assault­ed tran­scen­dence. But when the spec­ta­cle wears off, it’s a long, long fall back down to earth.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is all grown up. He’s about to head for col­lege, leav­ing a 40-foot high met­al alien in his tool­shed, and a smok­ing hot girl­friend in her garage where, appar­ent­ly, her favoured way of fix­ing motor­bikes is to dry hump the shit out of them until they splut­ter into life. And hon­est­ly, in those hot­pants, you wouldn’t bet against it working.

But things go awry when Sam starts freak­ing out in the mid­dle of an astron­o­my class. He’s see­ing weird alien signs in front of his eyes, and he’s being stalked by a sus­pi­cious­ly attrac­tive dead-eyed fem­bot. Mean­while, the US military’s top secret Spe­cial Ops team (you know, the one with the oth­er giant trans­form­ing aliens) is com­ing under pres­sure from an increas­ing amount of ene­my activ­i­ty, and increas­ing scruti­ny from those med­dle­some bean-coun­ters in the US gov­ern­ment. Shit is about to hit the fan. Big time.

It turns out that there’s a kind of pro­to-race of Trans­form­ers called the Primes. Like Opti­mus, kind of. But maybe not exact­ly. These Primes used to trav­el around the uni­verse blow­ing up suns to pow­er their trans­form­ing bat­ter­ies (and you thought humans weren’t eco-friend­ly), but only if the plan­ets near that sun weren’t inhab­it­ed. So that’s okay.

Any­way, one of these Primes decid­ed he didn’t like humans and want­ed to blow up our sun, but the oth­er Primes defeat­ed him, after which point he was for­ev­er known as ​‘The Fall­en’. He… Actu­al­ly, let’s face it, it real­ly doesn’t mat­ter. Bot­tom line: this Fall­en moth­er­fuck­er is back in town and some­body needs to kick his ass, like, pronto.

And so we enter a world in which the iron­ic rich­es of Team Amer­i­ca nev­er hap­pened. Where Paris and the pyra­mids can be chalked up as an accept­able degree of col­lat­er­al dam­age. Where the rules of log­ic can be cast aside because they don’t look good on screen.

And where Michael Bay can indulge every juve­nile fan­ta­sy his mind can con­ceive. This is the super­sized Bay Expe­ri­ence: the leer­ing, las­civ­i­ous cam­era that eats up Megan Fox; the palette of burn­ing gold and sun-drenched bronze skin; the low-slung pirou­ettes; the slo-mo; the hyper­ac­tive cuts; the run ​‘n’ gun combat.

And at times it works. This Trans­form­ers is, at its best, a tamer beast than the orig­i­nal. Though it starts with a sim­i­lar­ly high-pitched open­ing that is, lit­er­al­ly, impos­si­ble to fol­low with the naked eye, it calms down after that. There are three or four arrest­ing action scenes, and one or two bril­liant ones. Not least in a grand finale that sees a jaw-drop­ping num­ber of Trans­form­ers going toe-to-toe in a clear­ly chore­o­graphed bat­tle royale that has as good a sense of pace and geog­ra­phy as Bay will ever conjure.

The spe­cial effects are sen­sa­tion­al, even though the char­ac­ter design remains atro­cious. But how­ev­er blind­ing the film’s bright spots, there’s sim­ply no get­ting past Bay’s reduc­tive dis­in­ter­est in the mechan­ics of film­mak­ing. Indeed, in one cheeky scene, he makes it clear exact­ly what he thinks of all those braini­acs who com­plain about how, well, fuck­ing stu­pid his films are by blow­ing the shit out of a library.

But the point remains: Bay is an awful sto­ry­teller who’ll sac­ri­fice any ele­ment of log­ic or rea­son to serve the greater goal of aes­thet­ics. The film rais­es all sorts of ques­tions that it doesn’t stop to con­sid­er: why, if Trans­form­ers have been around for mil­len­nia, do they all look like late-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry mod­el cars? Why, if they have the spe­cial new tech­nol­o­gy seen in Sam’s col­lege, do they not make more use of it?

Why did the Decep­ti­cons not notice that an entire US bat­tle fleet was parked above the spot where they sank Mega­tron? Why, if the US has a spe­cial naval dooms­day gun, do they not just shoot all the bad guys with it? Why is Michael Bay such a shit direc­tor? Stuff like that.

This is also one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive films you’ll ever see. For­get the aliens, the real bad guy here is Civil­ian Over­sight. You see, world, this is the shit that hap­pens when you let the pussies run pol­i­tics. Sure, George Bush may have let a few thou­sands die on his watch, but you didn’t see an alien inva­sion get­ting past US bor­der guards back in the good old days.

Trans­form­ers is enter­tain­ment by vol­ume. Both in terms of a deci­bel lev­el that pum­mels you into sub­mis­sion, and a whop­ping run-time of around two-and-a-half hours. It feels like a tip­ping point – a kind of nir­vana for the Rital­in gen­er­a­tion. Just how loud­er, dumb­er and more expen­sive can cin­e­ma get? Pre­sum­ably we’ll find out when Trans­form­ers 3 hits town.